


maybe you'll be lonesome too

by elizajane



Series: hold it, and share it [2]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Established Relationship, Family, M/M, Not Beta Read, Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-07-06
Packaged: 2018-06-09 08:03:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 49
Words: 74,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6896860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elizajane/pseuds/elizajane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The phone, with its string of texts between him and Eric, is the only tangible evidence he has that kissing Bitty -- that Bitty kissing him back -- isn’t some sort of lucid dream brought on by the stress of graduation. So he’s been gripping it like a lifeline.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Monday, 18 May 2015

**Author's Note:**

> This work was written and posted on a daily basis for the [Can't Hardly Wait](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/CantHardlyWait_CheckPlease_DailyChallenge2016) challenge between 18 May - 5 July, 2016.
> 
> Each chapter was posted without beta review and subsequently some minor typographical and grammatical errors have been silently corrected. I have also made some minor changes (expansions and deletions) to some passages where I decided a day or two later more clarity or elaboration was needed.

“...what do you think, honey?” Alicia says from the front seat of his parents’ car, turning to look over her shoulder at Jack.

“Eh?” he looks up from where he’s thumbing up and down the text log on his phone, waiting for Bitty to land in Atlanta. The flight hadn’t left Logan more than twenty minutes ago but he can’t help himself. The phone, with its string of texts between him and Eric, is the only tangible evidence he has that kissing Bitty -- that Bitty kissing him  _ back _ \-- isn’t some sort of lucid dream brought on by the stress of graduation. So he’s been gripping it like a lifeline. 

“Do you want to see Aunt Wendy and Uncle Greg and the kids tomorrow? Or shall we say Wednesday?” his mother has her phone in her hand, poised to call her sister who is already in Wellfleet with her husband and the twins. 

“I’m --” he searches for a word that adequately describes how he’s feeling and settles for, “-- could it be Wednesday? I’m not really feeling up to -- there were a lot of people today.”

Bob, at the wheel, breaks as the traffic on Route 6 slows at the bottleneck of Sagamore Bridge. They’ll be at the cottage in about an hour. 

Jack’s skin feels rubbed raw all over, like it does sometimes after he’s had to give an interview or make a presentation in front of one of his classes. Even the usually-comfortable cotton of his Samwell hoodie too tight around the wrists and neck. All he wants to do is change into his pajama pants and retreat to his bedroom nook, where he can watch for text alerts on his phone and listen to the reassuring cadence of his parents unpacking groceries and making plans for their first days of the two-week vacation. 

He’s thumbing through his text history with Bitty again, reassuring himself. Bitty’s silence, despite the fact that it’s involuntary, is making room for his anxiety to escalate. Maybe he’s already getting this wrong. Maybe he should have stayed. He could have skipped lunch with his parents and Georgia, right? Maybe he should have offered borrow his parents’ car so he could drive Bitty to the airport -- or would that have just made Bitty feel cornered? Was it all a stupid mistake, taking his dad’s advice and just -- but he knows he would have lost his nerve, talked himself out of it, made himself believe Bitty would never want --

He sighs and tosses his phone onto the seat next to him, shifting in his seat to look out the window. 

“Georgia Martin is a very smart woman, Jack,” Bob says, glancing into the rear view mirror to catch Jack’s eye. “I’m impressed with how much she’s been able to accomplish in the three years she’s been with the Falconers.” 

It seems like a non sequitur but Jack is never sure with his father.

“She was telling me they have more women on staff than all but one other NHL team,” Alicia says appreciatively, as she ends the call with Jack’s aunt. “We’re having them over for a cookout on Wednesday; I volunteered you for that strawberry caprese you make, Bob.”

“I could make a pie,” Jack hears himself say. “I -- Bitty was showing me how to do berry pies last week.”

“That sounds lovely, honey,” Alicia says, fingers moving across her phone as she types out a text message. “I’ll tell Wendy they don’t have to worry about bringing anything but wine -- oh, and we can pick up supplies for the kids to make s’mores.”

Jack remembers vacations in Wellfleet when he was a kid, visiting Grandma and Grandpa Amory before they had passed away. Uncle Billy and his boyfriend Rich, and later Yannick, would build a bonfire in the pit at least once on Memorial Day weekend -- usually more -- and when Jack was six Uncle Billy had given him his first Swiss Army knife and taught him how to pick the right green shoots out in the woods and whittle them down to a point for roasting marshmallows. 

He picks up his phone again and smiles at the S.O.S. Shitty has sent to the group text from the required family dinner at the Harvard Club. He pulls up his keyboard and texts:

_ should have taken Lardo up on her offer _

He watches Holster chime in from the Amtrak to Buffalo and Chowder, already back in California for the summer, asking for pictures of the inside of the Club. It’s grounding to feel like the conversation is still burbling on, accessible to him.

He looks at the time and then checks when Bitty said he’d be arriving in Atlanta. 

Still ninety minutes to go.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Amory family cottages are loosely based on these [bauhaus modernist beauties](http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2015/jul/05/cape-cod-bauhaus-modernist-holiday-houses).
> 
> Of course Shitty's dad would belong to one of the [private social clubs](http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2015/04/28/boston-private-social-clubs/) of Boston.
> 
> I put Bob in charge of making [these](http://cookingontheweekends.com/2013/06/lemon-basil-strawberry-caprese-recipe/) because I want to eat them.
> 
> Title of the work comes from Kate Rusby's [You Belong to Me](http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/k/kate_rusby/you_belong_to_me.html).


	2. Tuesday, 19 May 2015

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This continues to be an experiment in write-and-publish. I'm practicing the art of letting go with this project. So please don't hesitate to point out if I failed at punctuation, if you discover a typo, or something else appears to be out of whack.

Eric wakes before sunrise to the sound of a horny blue jay in the chestnut tree outside his bedroom window. The shadows in the room and the dimensions of his bed and the close, humid air feel all wrong for a disorienting moment or two before he remembers where he is, back in Madison, and the way his life has just swooped dizzyingly off the course he’d expected it to take this summer.

He’s fallen asleep on his phone. He extracts it and then has to lean over to rummage through his duffle bag because the battery’s run down and he hadn’t plugged it in the night before.

Southwest had delivered him to Atlanta shortly before seven the evening before, and then there had been waiting at the luggage carousel and the hour’s drive to Madison. But even before texting Coach, waiting in the cell phone lot, that he’d arrived Eric had stopped in an out-of-the-way corner of the arrivals concourse to listen to the voicemail from Jack.

“Hi, Bittle. It’s Jack,” he’d started -- awkwardly introducing himself like he’d forgotten that Eric would be able to see what number the message was from. “I just, um. We’re here. At the cottage. And I know you’re still in the air but I’m -- I just wanted to call and tell you. That I miss you already and. Call me? When you get this. I’m pretty tired and I might be asleep but -- I’ll wake up if you call I just want to say goodnight. And maybe figure out when we can talk again? Okay, I should go. I hope you had a good flight. Bye.”

He’d followed it up with a text, as if he was worried Eric wouldn’t check his voicemail:

 _I left you a voicemail._  
_Just checking in._  
_Call me when you get there?_

Eric’s thumb had hovered over the “call” button for several long seconds before he had sighed and texted instead:

 _I’m here_  
_Coach is waiting so I can’t talk now but_  
_Maybe later?_

He’d hesitated, then added:

 _Thanks for leaving the vm_  
_It was nice to hear your voice_

Seconds later, as he was shouldering his backpack and looking around for the exit signs, his phone had vibrated the incoming text alert and Jack had responded:

_I’ll be here._

They’d texted during most of the drive down I-20, in the silences between Coach’s questions about the flight, Eric’s final exams, graduation, the start date for Eric’s job at Camp Oconee. They’d texted while Eric was standing in the kitchen eating a plate of leftover supper and talking to his mother. They’d texted while Eric brushed his teeth, dug out a clean pair of boxers, and crawled into bed with Señor Bun. And finally Eric had pressed the call button and Jack had picked up at the other end and it’s possible Eric, in his exhaustion, had let slip a “sweetheart” and signed off with “don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

Six hours later, thanks to the damn blue jay, he’s awake again.

He lets the phone charge for a few minutes and then powers up the phone and makes himself catch up with the team’s group text before opening up the conversation with Jack and texting:

 _Good morning_  
_Thanks to the blue jay outside my window I’m up early enough for practice_  
_But it’s summer so I’m gonna stay in bed_

Again, Jack responds before Eric’s screen goes dark and Eric wonders if he actually bothered to sleep.

_No excuses Bittle._

Eric grins.

_You’re not my team captain any longer, Mr. Zimmermann :-P_

Jack responds:

 _Thankfully._  
_In more ways than one._

There’s a pause, and then before Eric can decide whether Jack is waiting for a response the phone lights up with an incoming call. He answers and puts the phone to his ear.

“Hey.” He snuggles himself back against the pillows, hugging Señor Bun to his chest.

“Hey,” Jack says back, softly, and Eric wonders how much privacy he has.

“So what y’all doing today?” Eric asks, like this is the sort of conversation he has with Jack all the time. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine they’re sitting at the kitchen table back in the Haus. The last time they’d sat together sharing the remains of a blackberry pie, Eric had been achingly conscious of the way Jack’s knee kept bumping against his under the table, warm and familiar. He wonders now if Jack had felt the same way, if they’d sat there bumping knees while each of them pretended to be studying for finals and not desperately reminding themselves (certainly Eric had been reminding himself) that they _weren’t allowed to touch_.

Now he _is_ , apparently, allowed to touch.

And Jack was over a thousand miles away. For the next ten weeks. _Fuck_.

"Papa and I are going for a run at six,” Jack says. “And I’ll probably do some weight training.”

“Jack,” Eric says, “aren’t you supposed to be on vacation?”

Jack laughs, weakly. “Yeah, but -- I don’t want to get behind, you know? I mean, it’s gonna be hard enough as it is...” there’s an undercurrent of tight, familiar tension in his voice and Eric realizes he’s anxious about living up to expectations.

“Oh, honey,” Eric says. “You’re gonna be _fine_. And if they give you a hard time, you just let me know and I’ll bake up some fresh chocolate chip cookies to airmail up to Providence.”

“So you’re suggesting I bribe my way into the Falconers’ good graces?” Eric can hear the smile in Jack’s voice.

“You make that sound like a _bad_ thing,” Eric grins in response.

There’s a silence between them that isn’t an awkward pause but something -- something _contented_. When Eric calls home from Samwell and there’s dead air on the line it’s usually because either Eric or his dad have said something to which the other can’t formulate any meaningful response. This silence feels different. _Companionable_. Eric wants to sink to this silence and fall back asleep -- except then he’d have to stop talking to Jack.

“It’s -- it’s hard. Not being able to touch you,” Jack says, after a pause, as if he’s apologizing for something.

“That's good, right? That sounds good.” It sounds more than good to Eric actually. “I mean, not that we’re not touching, but that you want to touch me? I want to touch you, too.” _Oh god he sounds like such an idiot._ He pauses. “Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“Are we ... are we dating?” He hates how small his voice sounds, tinny and hesitant in his own ears. He’s imagined how this might go a hundred different ways and while more than a few of them had involved Jack reaching out and pulling Eric in for a kiss -- not unlike what had actually happened the day before -- he’s fairly certain none of them had featured him asking tremulously for clarification of their relationship.

In fantasies you always just ... _knew_.

Jack’s silence feels a little less comforting and a little more frightening this time around. “Jack?”

“I’d -- I’d like us to be,” Jack says. “If you want--”

“I want. Yes. _God_.” Eric presses his forefinger and thumb against the corners of his eyes, where tears are threatening to leak out. “God. I just -- I thought --” he drags in a ragged breath.

“I’m sorry I’m -- I’m sorry it took me so long to figure out --” Jack pauses, sighing. “I don’t have much experience with --”

“Me neither. I’m not used to --” Eric swallows around the lump in his throat, feeling he owes Jack honesty but also burning with shame at having to say it out loud. “I’m not used to people wanting me back.”

“Me neither,” Jack laughs, and Eric hears the harsh note that Jack can’t quite conceal.

“Did you --” he stops, not sure what he’s allowed to ask. “Have you ever --”

This time the pause feels deliberative, like Jack is formulating his response with care.

“There was Kent. Parson. You probably guessed. Before he went in the draft. I’ll -- I promise I’ll tell you about it sometime but. It’s complicated and --”

“No, no, it’s okay,” Eric’s mouth feels dry.

“Okay.” Jack draws a slow breath. “I promise I’ll -- just not today, okay?”

“Okay,” Eric echoes.

“And I went out with Camilla a few times but we never -- we hung out and let people gossip about us, but. It wasn’t -- it was an easy fiction. We both had our reasons to let people think we were dating, at the time. People saw what they wanted to see and we never corrected them. So it’s really only been Parse. Before you.”

“Before me,” Eric breathes, tasting the shape of the words on his tongue. _Jack ... and me._

Then he realizes Jack is waiting. “Oh! Uh,” he sighs. “Well, you know everything there is to know about my relationship history already, Jack. I was in the closet until I got to Samwell and I haven’t -- I never found anyone who turned my head, before you. So.” _God_ , he’s blushing. In the dark. On the phone. Clutching Bun. He sort of hates himself right now even though it feels like such a relief to say it out loud, to _Jack_. “So I’m. I’m a virgin. I guess.”

Jack snorts. “I’ve been friends with Shitty long enough to know this is where I tell you that virginity is a social construct.”

“Yeah, well.” Eric bites his lip. “It might be a social construct but it’s still, you know. _True_.”

“Mmm,” Jack responds, noncommittal. And then: “Can I tell my parents?

“You want to do that?” Eric startles at the question. He’d assumed --

“I’d like to,” Jack confirms. “I think they suspect already. I don’t want them to think we’re hiding it from them. I don’t -- I try not to keep secrets from my parents anymore.”

Oh, right. Eric swallows. _Fuck_. He’s going to have to figure out how to come out to his own parents now. If Mr. and Mrs. Zimmermann know …

“--Bitty?”

Eric blinks. Jack must have said something he missed. “Sorry I just -- yes. Yes _of course_ you can tell your parents, Jack. I’m just not … I’m not looking forward to telling my dad, is all. He’s going to be so disappointed.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack says quietly. “I know how that feels.”

_Oh. Right._

“Do you want me to be there?” He asks like if Eric said _yes_ Jack would be on the next flight out of Logan.

“I … I don’t know.” Eric hasn’t thought about this. “I’ll -- let me think about it?”

“Okay.”

“Who did you come out to, first?” Eric asks, after another silence that doesn’t feel awkward. Just hearing Jack say _do you want me there_ makes Eric feel like he’s that much closer. A tangible presence in the room. As if, were he to roll over right this moment and open his eyes Jack would be lying there with his head on Eric’s pillow, watching him with the same serious, solemn gaze he used when considering how to frame his next photograph.

“Kent,” Jack says, immediately. “Or, well. We never really -- it wasn’t something we talked about exactly. But he knew. I didn’t tell my parents until after I overdosed.”

“Did you --?” Eric thinks of the kids they lost to suicide in high school, three of them, at least one of whom he knew had killed herself because she couldn’t imagine how it would ever get better.

“It wasn’t -- technically, I was never suicidal,” Jack clarifies. “I never thought about deliberately killing myself. I just -- I couldn’t get the anxiety to stop and I was desperate.”

“How did your parents react? When you told them?”

Jack laughs, dryly. “To be honest, I think I could have told them I wanted to become a Buddhist monk or ... go into musical theatre instead of play hockey and they wouldn’t have blinked because I was _alive_.”

“Fair enough, but --” _will my parents still love me? Will they still look at me and see their son?_  is the question Eric really wishes he knew the answer to.

“My uncle Billy is gay,” Jack says, “my mother’s brother. So I wasn’t the first person in my family, which I think made it less of a shock.” Eric can almost hear the Gallic shrug.

“Yeah,” Eric sighs. No one in his sprawling, extended family is gay.

There’s a muffled exchange on the other end of the connection and then Jack is back, sounding apologetic. “Papa’s ready to go out for our run. I gotta go. Talk to you later?”

“Oh -- yeah. Sure.” Eric doesn’t want to let Jack’s voice go. Jack’s voice is wrapped up in all of Eric’s memories of Samwell, the Haus, the past two years during which he’s built a mostly-separate life for himself in Massachusetts -- a life where he’s a very different person than he was in high school. He’s feeling the weight of the long weeks of summer stretching out before him, who he was in this place lurking in every shadow, threatening to creep back under his skin.

“I’ll call later, Bitty. Or text. Or we could use FaceTime or Skype?”

Eric takes a careful breath. “Yeah, I’d -- yeah. I’d like that.”

“Okay." Jack hesitates, almost imperceptibly, and then finishes, "--Bye.”

“Bye,” Eric says back, and then hears Jack disconnect.

He listens to the silence of solitude for awhile. The jay outside has quit its yammering. The sun is up, now, and starting to make its slanting way through his cupcake-print curtains across the yellow walls. He hears the hiss of the neighbor’s sprinkler system go off. Down the hall, one of his parents enters, then exits the bathroom and there are light footfalls (his mother, then) on the stair.

Before he can fall back asleep, Eric kicks off his sheets and rolls out of bed to go take a shower and find out what’s for breakfast.


	3. Wednesday, 20 May 2015

“How’s this angle?” Jack adjusts the tilt of his cell phone where it’s propped on the window sill above the sink. It’s Wednesday and he’s embarked on his pie-baking adventure, aided by Bitty who’s busy in his own kitchen down in Madison trying some sort of finicky bread recipe he’s been trying to get right since he had a sandwich made with it at some place up in Boston.

“Oh, that’s much better!” Bitty glances up from where he’s kneading the dough, brushing his hair out of his eyes with the back of his wrist. He wriggles his fingers in a floury wave and Jack finds himself smiling for no reason at all other than that he and Bitty are hanging out in the kitchen together baking.

He feels a sudden wave of shame, looking back and seeing his entire senior year through the filter of his interactions with Bitty. It makes his ears buzz with horror to think how he almost didn’t _see_ this, how he’s looked and looked and looked from so many different angles and how he’d almost missed that being with Bitty didn’t just feel like this because Bitty was a good friend. Not just because he had woven himself so seamlessly into life at the Haus, so much so that Jack can barely remember what the Haus had felt like before Bitty lived there. That was part of it, but that wasn’t _all_ of it. He’d thought he felt at home with Bitty because he felt at home with the team, at the Haus, at Samwell. Now he’s starting to wonder if he didn’t feel at home at Samwell, at the Haus, on the team because Bitty was there.

It’s not entirely true. He already misses the easy chaos of the Haus and can’t picture what it’s going to feel like returning home from training days to the loft he’s renting in Pawtucket. He’s never lived _alone_ , unless you count stints when he was living at his parents house before Samwell and they’d go away for a few days or a week. He’d go through entire days without speaking aloud. It was nice. But it’s different knowing solitude is temporary. Solitude in Pawtucket is...

“There!” Bitty’s voice pulls Jack back from the teetering edge of future change into the present, where at the other end of the FaceTime connection Bitty has just straightened from putting the dough into the oven to rise a second time. He trots over to where he has his own phone propped, his face looming and then swooping on Jack’s screen as he picks up the phone and plops himself down at the kitchen table. “Now all I gotta do is wait for it to double, so I’m all yours Jack. You ready to bake some pie crust?”

Jack’s actually baked enough pies in the past year to feel fairly confident in his pie crust abilities, so he measures and mixes with minimal intervention from Bitty. They talk instead about how the team is settling in at their various places of summer residence. About Ransom and Holster’s planned August road trip out to Yellowstone, Lardo’s summer job at a gallery on Newbury Street in Boston, Shitty’s constant stream of profane observations about his family on the group text.

“Did you spend every summer with your parents while you were in college Jack?” Bitty asks, while Jack is carefully stirring sugar and cornstarch into the freshly-washed blueberries that he bought earlier that morning at the little grocery in town.

There’s something behind Bitty’s question that Jack isn’t sure he understands, but it’s not a complicated question to answer so he just says, “Sort of, though I always spent a lot of time training, and the camps I went to weren’t always near home.”

“Did it feel ... weird? To go back to your parents house, like it was home but not really home anymore?”

Jack considers the question, watching the blueberry juice turn purple against the white ceramic of the mixing bowl.

“I’m -- ’m not sure I’ve ever lived in a place that really felt like _home_ ,” he admits. “The house my parents live in, now, they bought it after I started at Samwell. And I lived away from home a lot as a kid because of the juniors.”

He pours the berries into the two pre-baked pie crusts and starts draping the lattice strips across the top -- he always manages to get the weaving on this bit wrong.

“I think, until Samwell, _this_ place felt as much like home as anything -- Mom and Papa and I used to spend a few weeks here every summer, before my grandparents died, and then after. Mom’s brother and sister would come too, and their partners. I was the only kid for a long time -- Charlotte and Helena weren’t born until I was coaching -- but there was always someone willing to read to me or teach me how to ride a bike or take me swimming. And it’s quiet here, and dark. I used to think about running away and hitch-hiking back here, when the anxiety was really bad. It’s always seemed … safe.”

Across the connection Bitty sighs. “It must be nice to have a place like that.”

“You ... don’t?” Jack asks carefully, not entirely certain Bitty wants him to ask.

“The Haus,” Bitty says. “I think. Before that, no. Not really.” He considers. “Maybe -- maybe cooking with my mother? The kitchen’s always felt like home, really, no matter where that kitchen it is.” He laughs and shakes his head like he’s amused himself. “So you’re having family for supper tonight? Tell me about these cousins of yours, Jack! How do I know so little about your family after a whole year of living with you ... ”

Jack hears the tires of the family car out in the drive, the slam of the driver’s side door as his mother returns from the pottery studio she’d gone to visit. She’s coming in through the door moments later, shopping bag in hand.

“They’re still doing the Ruby Waves pattern!”  she says, to both Jack in the kitchen and Bob who’s sitting with his laptop on the living room couch. “I was able to replace those dinner plates that we -- oh! Hello, Eric!” She catches sight of Bitty’s face on the sill and waves.

“Hello Mrs. Zimmermann,” Bitty waves back.

“You’re helping Jack with his pies?”

“Just keepin’ him company, ma’am,” Bitty grins. “He’s a veteran pie maker now, given that he lived with me for a whole year! I have a way of rubbing off on certain people. Jack particularly.”

Jack chokes, glancing sharply at Bitty’s face on the screen. Bitty is smiling sweetly and Jack can’t tell whether he’s just said something inadvertently filthy or whether he’d meant it deliberately.

Alicia just laughs, “Well, I’m certainly not going to complain if it means I have a son who bakes me pies on vacation!” She kicks off her sandals and goes to the refrigerator to pull out a seltzer water, pressing a kiss to his floured cheek on her way by. “You say hi to Suzanne for me, won’t you? And tell her I haven’t forgotten about getting that butter tart recipe from Sylvie -- I just haven’t been to book club since we talked about it.”

“She’s out weeding the garden this afternoon,” Bitty says, nodding, “but I’ll let her know. Butter tarts.”

“Well,” she says, “it sounds like you two have things under control. I’m going to go lie down for a nap before Wendy and Greg and the girls get here.”

“Nice to see you Mrs. Z!” Bitty waves.

“You too, Eric,” she smiles. “Hope we see you again in person before too long.”

Bitty blushes, though Jack thinks maybe he’s the only one who notices. “Me too, ma’am.”

“You really should call me Alicia,” his mother reminds him cheerfully, winking at Jack as she turns around to head for the bedroom. The glass of seltzer she has in her hand rises and falls in an almost-imperceptible salute.

Jack feels a breathless stab of something in his chest that’s akin to the fierce triumph followed by terror that runs through him when his team executes a play _just so_ or scores a goal against the odds. _Joy_ , he thinks. Followed by a spiking fear that in _this_ moment he is the best he could ever be, and he’ll never be able to live up to being the person who played that way.

He takes a deep, slow breath to steady himself, and thinks about the imperfect latticework on his blueberry pies, and about how even though they aren’t perfect Bitty still thinks they pass muster.

He can do this. Bitty’s got his back now.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Kemp Pottery](http://www.kemppottery.com/functional-ware/dinnerware%20) in Orleans is where Alicia's been shopping. 
> 
> [Butter Tarts](http://www.canadianliving.com/food/baking_and_desserts/best_butter_tarts.php%20) are like pecan pie without the pecans. Would Bitty and Suzanne approve Y/N?


	4. Thursday, 21 May 2015

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m visiting my in laws this weekend and currently writing this on an inflatable mattress in a shed listening to the peepers in the pond and fending off giant mosquitoes. But neither of us trying to get pregnant, so at least we don’t have to worry about zika? Anyway. I apologize that tonight’s and tomorrow’s installments are brief due to travel.

Eric records a vlog on his third day home for summer vacation and doesn’t include anything about Jack.

Well, no. Strictly speaking Eric _does_ say a great deal about Jack -- it’s just that none of it makes it into the final, edited version because he’s chicken.

“...so all y’all might remember how I talked a few months back about having a crush on someone? Well, it turns out he’s not straight after all! And right after graduation he kissed me! Oh, my Lord I didn’t expect it to happen _at all_! I’d already gone back to the Haus to fold some laundry Chowder had left in the dryer when all of a sudden there’s this boy, so beautiful and disheveled and breathless running up the stairs to find me and I thought -- I thought something must be wrong! But instead. Instead, he _kissed me_ and oh my goodness for a moment I felt like a heroine at the end of a romantic comedy! Just when she thinks she’s somehow ruined her chance at happiness forever -- she turns around and there he is, saying yes!”

He wants to say all of this and more. Part of him wants to talk about the way Jack’s palms had felt, warm and slightly sweaty from nerves and his sprint across campus. He wants to talk about how Jack had tasted, salty from sweat and the acrid taste of his morning coffee and _soft_ , God in heaven, Jack’s lips were so soft and only the littlest bit chapped (because he never remembered to use lip balm and was always biting them), and had been gentle at first, but all too willing to open beneath the tip of Eric’s tongue, licked daringly out to taste the sweep of Jack’s bottom lip, to tease at the little pucker at the corner of his mouth.

He wants to say all of this. He’s practically bouncing on his toes at the kitchen counter while he talks, between deft folds of pastry dough and and the spread of peach jam serving as the base for his Bakewell tart.

So he says it. Because his father is at work and his mother is out running errands and he’s alone in the house and he can let spill all of the words he been storing up inside.

But then while the tart is cooling by the stove and he’s safely back in his room with his headphones over his ears, he edits all of the words out of his final video and drops them with the drag and click of his mouse into the trash.

And then he empties the trash for good measure. As if somehow the sound clips might jump back out of the trash and re-attach themselves to the final video.

He doesn’t _think_ he’s said anything incriminating -- anything that would lead people to believe he and Jack Zimmermann are dating ( _dating!_ ).

But he can’t risk one of the women who follows his vlog and the Pinterest he and his mother share watching and then mentioning something in chat to Suzanne. Can’t risk some sports reporter Googling all of Jack’s teammates and finding his Twitter and then finding his vlog. And putting two and two together.

He knows Jack’s told Mr. and Mrs. Zimmermann but he hasn’t said anything about _coming out_ coming out. And it feels too soon to ask.

So he edits, ruthlessly erasing Jack from his public self, and posts a vlog about the difference between tarts and pies and his goal of mastering both sweet and savory tarts over the summer. He’ll always be a pie man at heart, but a baker does have to have flexibility. And Eric enjoys branching out in new directions -- in cooking at least.

Then, while the vlog is uploading on his parents slow and uncertain Internet connection, Eric digs his cell phone out of his pocket and curls up in his old papasan chair to send a text to Jack:

_Hey!_  
_Hope you had a nice bike ride this morning with Charlotte and Helena_  
_Want to talk later?_  
_I’d like to talk later_  
_I miss you_  
_I really miss you_  
_I miss the Haus_  
_And the rest of the team_  
_But mostly I miss you_  
_I had a dream last night that you came down to Georgia and kissed me again  
I sure didn’t waste any time before kissing you back_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Bakewell tart](http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/bakewell_tart_90600) is yummy. We just had soe for my mother-in-law's 70th birthday.


	5. Friday, 22 May 2015

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How is it y'all let me get five chapters in before I realized I was spelling "Zimmermann" with one N rather than two??

Though he’s on vacation, Jack still wakes up around 5am -- even if he’s been up texting Bits until after midnight (like he had been the night before). Something about the light coming through the windows of his room, no matter where he’s sleeping, wakes him up shortly before sunrise unless he’s sick.

This morning, he pulls on his jogging layers and a worn Samwell hoodie then pads in stocking feet out to the porch, while his parents are still sleeping, to go through his warm-up stretches. Then he steals his parents’ keys, leaves a note on the kitchen counter, and goes out to the car with a bottle of water, a banana, and his camera bag in hand.

Out at the end of Chequessett Neck Road is the picnic area off which the Great Island trail runs out into Cape Cod Bay. Jack parks the car and straps his camera case across his chest before taking off as a steady jog out to the overlook at Jeremy Point. It’s a crisp morning -- overnight temperatures having bottomed out around eight degrees Celsius -- and he’s glad for the hoodie before he starts to warm. He’s also glad of the quiet.

Mostly, Jack’s comfortable spending time with his parents. He and his mother have been especially close since the two years he spent living at home and coaching; he and Papa only have a limited range of conversational topics (hockey, the sports profession, hockey, politics, hockey, his dad’s charitable work, hockey, Samwell, and of course hockey) but mostly those get them through.

Since Jack signed with the Falconers he’s noticed a new, tentative openness between them as if now that Jack’s made it into the realm of professional hockey his father feels he’s done right by his son and can stop trying so hard. Their telephone conversations since Christmas have been a little easier, and although he and Papa have gone running every morning and they’ve watched a few games together on streaming, they haven’t talked a lot about Jack’s new job. And he’s surprisingly grateful for that, for the way he can sink into this ten-day vacation and pretend for a little bit longer that his immediate future isn’t so overwhelming and unknowable as it mostly feels.

But he's still grateful this morning for a little time to himself.

He’d told his parents about Bitty on Tuesday evening, over dinner. They had always associated the secret of his relationship with Kent with his overdose, and even though Jack and his psychiatrist and his therapist had all agreed that it was only one of multiple precipitating factors, Jack was determined not to let a cloud of parental concern obscure for even a moment the radiant light that Bitty is in his life.

Kent had felt … slightly dangerous, thrilling, heady. Being with Kent had helped Jack forget how desperate he felt because Kent managed to convince him the desperation was _ambition._ That the desperation was part and parcel of the life they both wanted, _together_.

Some part of Jack wonders if Kent still believes that. Some part of Jack still remembers well enough what that headspace is like to fear being pulled back into it when he’s in Kent’s orbit. Which is why he tries as much as possible to keep Kent at a distance. Though he knows Kent and his parents still stay in touch on Facebook and Twitter, and Kent will stop by their house when he’s in Montreal for a game. Jack’s asked his parents not to talk to him about Kent, unless they really think he needs to know, and so far they’ve respected that boundary.

So Jack wants to be really clear right from the start that the energy he and Bitty share -- on the ice and off it -- is a world apart. And he thinks a good way to start is to tell the people who care about him that he and Bitty are dating.

“Mom, Papa, I, um,” he’d said, looking down at his plate of asparagus and scallops. “I want to tell you both something.”

They had waited, not impatiently. His mother had picked up a glass of the sauvignon blanc she and Papa _ _were splitting between them and taken a sip.__

“Bittle and I are --” he’d taken a steadying breath. “Bittle’s agreed to be my boyfriend.” He’d been unable to look at their faces but even staring down at his meal he couldn’t help the broad smile that spread across his face just thinking about the fact of what he’s saying. It had been just over twenty-four hours since he’d stood in the Haus and felt Bitty’s pulse racing against the tips of his fingers, heard the tinny sound of Bitty’s music vibrating through the little earbuds he’d pulled out of his ears and let drop, kissed and licked the salty tears off Bitty’s damp skin.

“We’re dating,” he says to his plate, feeling the happiness spreading through his chest like warm maple milk on a bitter winter’s morning.

“Oh, darling, I’m so happy for you both!” His mother had said, sounding more pleased than surprised.

“Well done, son,” his father had said, with a trace of smugness Jack would have begrudged him if it hadn’t been for the fact that _Papa _was the one who’d prodded him to take this chance in the first place.__

There has been a new openness between them, Jack thinks, since he’s signed with the Falconers. It’s finally started to feel like he and his father can stop having the same conversation they’ve been having for six years and start learning who it is they’ve become in the interim.

Jack, for example, has become a son who will be bringing his boyfriend with him (fingers crossed) when they all come out to the Cape next year for the family reunion. He wonders, suddenly, where he and Bitty will sleep -- he’s always just had his old twin bed in the alcove off the living room. He wonders what Bitty will make of Helena and Charlotte, and has no doubt that Bitty will enjoy talking with Yannick about the musical and theatrical productions he works crew for.

The sandy trail is rough going, and Jack is more breathless than he’d like to be when he reaches the overlook. He drops on a fallen tree trunk that, by the look of the worn bark, has seen many hikers’ asses before his, and drinks half the water bottle he’s brought with him, then eats the banana.

He pulls his cell phone out of his bag and texts Bitty _Wish you were here_ with a picture of the view. A few seconds later -- he wonders if he’s woken Bitty up or if the blue jay has returned to the chestnut tree outside Bitty’s window -- his phone vibrates:

_OMG why are you sending me pictures of A BEACH when you should be sending me pictures of YOU??_

Jack grins and types out:

_Because I am all sweaty and horrible looking?_

This gets him a string of emoji that Jack thinks probably amount to the visual expression of exasperation if only because they are followed up by:

_I think you mean sweaty and MANLY and GORGEOUS Mr. Zimmermann!!_

He turns the phone’s camera on himself and snaps a photo of himself trying to frown. It comes out slightly blurry but he sends it anyway, writing:

_There’s no accounting for taste I suppose._

To which Bitty responds:

 _#BestBoyfriend_  
_200/10 would kiss_

Jack isn’t sure what to make of the fraction, but feels pretty confident in interpreting the response as a positive one.

 _Gonna spend some time with my real camera._ He types out. _Maybe we can FaceTime when I get back to the cottage, over breakfast?_

 _Sure! <3_ is Bitty’s reply.

Jack smiles, unaccountably happy, down at the screen for several seconds, before pressing the button to make the screen go black so he can slip the phone back into the zippered pocket of his bag. Then he gets out his Nikon and contemplates his lens options. He’s hoping to carry some of the peace of this place with him when he moves down to Providence for the next chapter of his life. And maybe some good pictures will help him do that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Great Island Trail](https://www.nps.gov/caco/planyourvisit/upload/GreatIIslandseparationsfinal.pdf) (Cape Cod National Seashore). 
> 
> Here are [some photos](http://www.105firephotos.com/Photography/Nature/Great-Island-Trail-Wellfleet/i-hzbcWZp) of the Great Island area.


	6. Saturday, 23 May 2015

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Note: A brief mention of Eric being bullied in high school, including homophobic slurs.
> 
> I also noticed this morning I've been inconsistent in the language I use to talk about Bob, Alicia, Suzanne, and Coach (Suzanne vs. Mama etc.). I'll be going back and tweaking that.

Eric remembers this from last summer, the weird aimlessness between when he gets back to Madison and when Camp Oconee starts for the first session of the summer. He’ll report for counselor orientation and pre-camp work days starting June 3rd but until then his days are largely unscheduled.

He catches up on sleep and does his laundry and records a few vlog episodes on Georgia foodways to post during camp sessions when his personal time will be more limited. He volunteers to do the grocery shopping and makes dinner for his parents, since Coach is still up at the high school and his mother is putting the finishing touches on her painted-wood wall art and refurbished furniture for the summer craft fair season.

He talks to Jack. He texts Jack. He sends selfies to Jack that flirt with impropriety although he’s a little too shy to do anything, even in private messages, that could get Jack in trouble. Not that Jack’s told him even once to be careful, to censor himself. At this point Jack’s told more people than Eric has about their relationship (Jack: 2, Eric: 0). But Eric worries. He worries about doing the wrong thing and getting Jack in trouble before Jack’s even started his new job.

He lays awake at night and tries to imagine coming out to his parents -- an exercise that’s as exhausting as it is familiar. It’s a conversation he’s had with himself since he’d first begun to suspect he liked boys that way. Around the time that being called “faggot” in the halls at school stopped feeling like generalized homophobia and began feeling more like targeted hate. When being “accidentally” pushed against lockers during passing time stopped feeling like casual harassment (the kind all the smaller boys endured) and more like personalized aggression.

Morgan County High School had not had an official Gay-Straight Alliance, but unofficially there had been a handful of theatre kids and a lesbian couple from the soccer team who’d stuck together and been working against entrenched opposition to establish a GSA chapter. Eric had always admired their fuck-you attitude as he watched them wistfully from across the cafeteria. One of the soccer players was even the daughter of his Chemistry teacher, Mrs. Nelson, and Mrs. Nelson had hosted meetings for the group in her living room the first Monday of every month. Once, during his junior year, Eric had almost attended. He’d memorized the street address from the group’s Facebook page and driven by the house just as the meeting was getting started. But then he had panicked at the thought of someone seeing Coach Bittle’s truck parked outside the Nelson’s on a meeting night and hadn’t been able to put his foot on the brake. He’d driven to WalMart instead and bought ingredients to make lemon chiffon pie.

College, he’d told himself. In college he’d figure out how to be brave.

And here he is nearly three years later, out and proud in Massachusetts, but no more able to say the words “I’m gay” to his parents now as he had been at the age of seventeen.

“Dicky?” his mother calls up the basement stairs, startling Eric out of his despondent Twitter scrolling.

“Yes, Mama?”

“The cornflowers on these baskets are taking longer than I’d calculated,” Suzanne says, emerging from the basement and going to the kitchen sink to refill her water bottle. “And I promised Richie Frederickson over at the Pavilion that I’d replenish the booth for Memorial Day weekend. Would you be willing to --”

“Sure thing!” Eric pockets his phone and looks around for his sandals. Anything to get out of the house at this point -- and he’s always enjoyed poking around the Blue Star Antiques Pavilion looking for old kitchen gadgets and cookbooks. His mother’s been selling with Mr. Frederickson since before they’d moved to Madison and even before she was making her own work she’d take Eric along on her scrounging expeditions around the state. (Suzanne had had to remind him, in the early days, to keep his hands to himself when the shop proprietors were in sight. Not every grownup understood how carefully he handled glass or how deft he was with a knife.) He’d bought his first mixing bowl when he was eight, with the allowance he’d saved from helping Suzanne weed and water the garden and pick the chestnuts out of the grass in the front yard.

The morning sun is already pushing the temperatures in the gravel parking area well above eighty degrees when Eric pulls his parents’ minivan off the county road and up in front of the Pavilion, already starting to fill up with holiday shoppers. He pulls one of the three cardboard boxes filled with smaller pieces - wooden cutting boards, mixing spoons, bowls -- out of the back of the van and locks up before shouldering his way into the cavernous, air conditioned space.

“Hey Mr. Frederickson!” he nods to the man behind the front counter. “Mama sent me to stock up ahead of the long weekend.”

“Eric Bittle?” Mr. Frederickson grins, “Good to see you around again, son! Home for the summer?”

“Yessir.”

“You be working over at Camp Oconee again?”

“Kitchen patrol, sir,” Eric grins, “They put me in charge of the dinner crew this year -- won’t know what hit ‘em.” He’s worked in the kitchen two summers running now, and takes pride in how efficiently he and his team can prepare, serve, and clean up the evening meal for the camp’s 150-200 over-nighters.

“Annie’ll be there again too -- lifeguard duty and counselor in one of the junior girls’ bunkhouses.” Mr. Frederickson nods. “Keep those kiddos out of trouble.”

Eric laughs, “I keep a house full of college hockey players outta trouble now, sir; there’s nothin’ much a fifth grade boy’s gonna get by me.”

“That’s right,” Mr. Frederickson grins, “You’re playing hockey somewhere up north. Suzanne said your team’s pretty good?”  
“You could say that,” Eric smiles and shrugs, already transforming this exchange into a story he can relate to Jack when they talk later that evening. “They work us pretty hard but, I mean, it pays the bills so I can’t complain.”

Mr. Frederickson rummages under the counter and pulls out a key that he puts on the counter. “This here’s your mother’s booth,” he points to it on the floor map under the plexiglass of the counter top. “Same’s it’s been for the last two years so I expect you know where you’re going. Suzanne send an inventory and a price list?”

Eric shifts the box to his hip and pulls out the papers for Mr. Frederickson, then grabs the key and heads off down the aisle.

It takes him five trips to bring in the boxes and the several larger pieces -- two chairs and a canoe paddle -- that he and Suzanne had wrestled into the back of the van. He gets everything tastefully arranged in the booth and then tidies away the empty cardboard boxes before treating himself to a wander through the warren of booths.

He’s not looking for anything in particular, but then he never is and he always finds something to add to the box in his parents’ basement where he tucks away odds and ends for his future kitchen. A mixing bowl here and egg cups there, a set of cookie molds, a trivet painted with a rabbit that secretly reminded him of Señor Bun.

It’s on a lower shelf in one of the overcrowded, little-tended booths in the back that he finds a shoe box full of old unidentified snapshots. Sometimes his mother uses old photographs in her art assemblages so he pulls out the box and flips through to see if there’s anything interesting to take home to her. He sets aside a picture of a little girl on a pony, and one of a woman sitting on a stoop with an apron full of kittens.

He almost misses it, the photograph of the two young men standing at what looks like a campsite with their arms slung familiarly around one another, cheek to cheek, gazing boldly at the camera. The man on the right has what almost looks to be a water lily tucked into the placket of his open-necked shirt.

He runs his finger over the top edge of the photograph, then picks it carefully out of the box and flips it over. “Frank and Vince,” it reads, “Oswego - 1923.”

He almost puts the photograph back. But something in the boys’ expressions makes it impossible for him to do so. He suddenly doesn’t want anyone else who might shop here to ever see this image; wants to protect Frank and Vince from the prying eyes of the world. So he tucks the photograph under the kitten and the pony photographs, then quickly selects seven more random landscapes and group scenes to make the pile an even ten (“10 for $5!” reads the label on the front of the box).

He takes the photographs up to the counter and makes small talk about the weather with the woman who’s covering for Mr. Frederickson at the register. He pulls out his wallet and lets her charge the $5.40 to his debit card. He hands the key to his mother’s notions case to the clerk and carries the brown paper-wrapped parcel of photographs out to the car.

Maybe, he thinks, as he flips through the radio stations looking for good music for the drive home, maybe he’ll get the photograph framed and send it to Jack’s new address in Pawtucket as a housewarming present.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I stole Frank and Vince from [this set of vintage photographs](http://www.thegailygrind.com/2013/03/21/lgbt-history-photos-of-gay-couples-from-the-1880s-1920s-tbt/).
> 
> I named Eric's summer camp after the [Oconee National Forest](http://www.fs.usda.gov/recmain/conf/recreation) outside of Madison. 
> 
> My outlaw GSA group was inspired by the kids in [Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America](http://nyupress.org/books/9780814731932/) by Mary L. Gray which is an excellent read. Queer kids are amazing.
> 
> Georgia [does have a GSA](http://www.georgiasafeschoolscoalition.org/) coalition and I'm pretty sure they do the work of goddesses and angels every damn day. 
> 
> I named the antiques mall where Suzanne sells her work after [this place](http://saugatuckantiquepavilion.com/) near where I grew up. I've (sadly!) never found photographs of random same-sex couples at that particular antique store, but my mother found one once in a box full of family photographs related to the family that built my parents' home in the 1890s:
>
>> a spinster schoolteacher-artist & her ??, at one time lived in the house my parents' now own. Minnie faces the camera & "friend" unknown.
>> 
>> — AnnaClutterbuck-Cook (@feministlib) [May 24, 2016](https://twitter.com/feministlib/status/735176342556266496)  
> 
> 
> We've always been here if you knew where and how to look. 


	7. Sunday, 24 May 2015

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted this to be longer but Jack and Uncle Billy are men of few words, apparently. WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED. And I need to get to bed. So enjoy their beer-drinking male bonding. They're just gonna have to have conversation, part two, later in the week possibly with Yannick's prodding. 
> 
> *gives characters the side-eye*

Uncle Billy is the third person with whom Jack shares his news about Eric.

His uncles arrive on the Cape Sunday afternoon. Yannick has already been splitting his time between Boston and Dennis for the past two months as he juggles the end of the semester with preparations for the opening of the season at the Playhouse. But now they’ve both turned in their final grades and they can pack Fergus and Angus into the back of the car, sublease their South End apartment for the summer, and relocate to the Cape for the season.

“Jack!” Yannick greets him through the Prius’ open window when they pull up to the house just as Bob is coaxing the coals in the chimney starter into flame. “The mighty college graduate!”

One of the things that used to irritate Jack about Yannick, although it doesn’t bother him now, is Yannick’s utter indifference to professional sport of any kind. Even hockey. Despite being Québécois (though he’s lived in Boston now for nearly a decade) and Bob Zimmermann’s brother-in-law, Yannick is resistant to all forms of hockey-related information. Of course Yannick would think of Jack as the family’s “college graduate” not a soon-to-be rookie Falconer.

The two Irish Setters tumble out of the back seat of the car onto the gravel drive as soon as Uncle Billy kills the engine and steps out of the driver’s seat to open the back door. Their back ends are wriggling madly as they race around to every human in sight, offering ecstatic greetings.

Jack waves and pulls his earbuds out of his ears, hitting pause on the tape he’s been watching on his laptop. He can hear Bitty rolling his eyes all the way from Georgia, but even though this is his vacation he starts his new job a week from Tuesday and the only way to keep the anxiety at bay is to keep his body distracted through workouts and his mind distracted through analyzing every Falconer’s game from the current season -- and of course Bitty. Always Bitty, close by somewhere, somehow, even from a thousand miles away.

He glances down at his phone and types out, _My uncles are here. Talk to you later?_

 _Pics or it didn’t happen! ;-)_ Bitty texts back.

Jack feels his lips twitch in a private smile as he pockets his phone and goes into the house to let Alicia know that her brother and his husband have arrived.

He’s still in the kitchen, trying to decipher Bitty’s latest burst of emoji-laden text, when Uncle Billy comes inside with a cardboard box that turns out to contain a variety of local brews.

“We came bearing gifts,” Uncle Billy says by way of greeting. “And by gifts I mean beer. I’ve been saving all the best ale for when I finished grading the last of those damnable senior portfolios.”

Jack snaps a photo of the inside of the box with his phone before helping Uncle Billy unload; _Think Shitty would be jealous?_ He asks queries Bitty, attaching the photo and hitting send.

A string of five little yellow chicks appear, which Jack has learned to translate as the visual verb form of _chirping_.

“These all need to go in the fridge?” he asks -- this stuff is fancier than pretty much anything that’s passed through his hands in the past four years.

“Leave out two of the Blind Faith IPAs and those Mostly Cloudys from Long Trail -- I brought those for your parents because they’ve developed a taste for the Belgian Witbeir lately. And whatever you want, of course. No pressure. I know sometimes you’re not--”

Jack considers the array before him. “Yeah, I got out of the habit during college,” he says, and it still feels weird to talk about Samwell in the past tense. “ _Someone_ had to stay sober enough to make sure no one drowned in the toilet bowl.”

Uncle Billy laughs, “Ah, the good old days.” He leans over the island and plucks a porter labeled Jack’s Abby out of the jumble of bottles that Jack’s starting to stack carefully in the bottom shelf of the fridge. “Try this baby.” He turns to rummage around in the cupboards for a tray and then the bottle opener.

“So,” Jack hears his uncle say behind him, in a deceptively-casual tone of voice that makes him pause in his fridge-stocking. “Just between the two of us, you understand. Alicia hinted heavily last night that you might have some news to share.” He hears the pop and hiss of one of the bottle caps being pried off.

Jack snorts, torn between gratitude toward his mother and exasperation that she’s toeing ever so skillfully inside the line of letting him do this at his own (and Bitty’s) pace.

“I put this out there,” Uncle Billy continues, while Jack returns to his task, “not because I particularly wish to pry but because I want you to know Yannick and I are both --” he nudges Jack on the shoulder with the open bottle of beer. “--you know we want you to be happy, Jack. And we’re right up the road in Boston whenever you and -- whenever you need us.”

“His name’s Eric.” Jack hears himself say, smiling around the shape of Bitty’s name. “Eric Bittle.”

“That sophomore on your line? The speedy little fucker who got checked last year?” Yannick may not follow hockey, but Uncle Billy -- also a Samwell graduate -- has kept abreast of Jack’s career as a college athlete as well as a student.

“Yeah,” Jack takes a sip of his beer and rolls the taste around on the back of his tongue. “Yeah, we’re -- it’s pretty new. In some ways. He’s back in Georgia for the summer but--” he nods, half to himself, picking at the label on the Jack’s Abby bottle with his thumbnail. “But yeah. It’s good. _We’re_ good.”

He looks shyly up at his uncle, who’s leaning back next to him on the island, his own IPA in hand. “Sometimes you just _know_ , eh?”

  
“Sometimes you do,” his uncle agrees, bumping him gently in the shoulder again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Product Placements:
> 
> Jack's Abby: [Smoke & Dagger](http://jacksabby.com/beers/smoke-dagger/).
> 
> Long Trail Brewing: [Mostly Cloudy](http://longtrail.com/beers/mostly-cloudy).
> 
> Magic Hat: [Blind Faith](http://www.magichat.net/elixirs/blindfaith/).
> 
> Uncle Yannick works at [The Cape Playhouse](http://capeplayhouse.com/) during the summers and adjuncts at Emerson College teaching stagecraft during the school year.
> 
> Uncle Billy teaches in the Architecture department at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. 
> 
> Neither of these colleges are aware that the fictional gay uncles of a fictional gay hockey player / photographer / adorable boyfriend to Eric Bittle are in their employ.


	8. Monday, 25 May 2015

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Note: Jack talks about some possibly-coercive sexual encounters involving alcohol when he and Kent Parson were in the Q together. If you want expanded commentary see the end notes.

Memorial Day dawns hot and humid, with the thermometer outside the Bittles’ kitchen window already reading 77℉ in the shade when Eric stumbles into the kitchen for a bowl of cereal. The parade down Main Street, led by the American Legion band, sets off at nine o’clock sharp followed by the flag raising ceremony in Town Park. Then from ten to four there’s an arts and crafts fair, with face painting and a few local bands playing rotating sets -- clog dancers, a blues band, a man with a banjo who’s been telling stories and singing songs for the under-fives since Eric was under five himself.

Eric’s been enlisted to help his mother at her booth, which means getting up at seven and being ready to leave the house at eight so that all the wares (which they loaded into the Toyota Sienna the night before) can be in place by ten.

“Dicky? Could you run out to the garage and get the blue cooler?” Suzanne asks, from where she’s assembling sandwiches at the kitchen counter. There’ll be food trucks at the fair, a few of which Eric actually wants to try, but he knows from experience that his mother never leaves the house for more than a few hours without enough food to feed an army. (And his teammates wonder where Eric learned how to feed a house full of college athletes…they have clearly not spent enough time with Suzanne Bittle.)

He goes out to the garage and unearths the blue cooler, then fills it with ice from the storage freezer nearly emptied in preparation for this year’s garden harvest. The shelves above the freezer are also nearly cleared of last years’ preserves. He remembers he needs to make sure he gets his mother’s peach salsa recipe before going back to Samwell -- or maybe he can just can up enough while he’s home to last the Haus through to Halloween, at least.

It’s not until they’re halfway through unloading and setting up Suzanne’s tent that Eric realizes that _exactly one week ago_ he was back at the Haus helping Jack choose which tie to wear to graduation.

He fumbles and nearly drops the jewelry display he’s assembling. After a reflexive save he feels his teammates would be proud of, Eric puts the half-built wire framework down on the table and looks around for somewhere private -- _anywhere_ private -- on the bustling public green where he can pull out his phone and call Jack.

He knows Jack is out on an early morning bike ride with his parents today. Some sort of charity event that Bob Zimmermann helped organize, to raise funds for MS research, from Dennis to Wellfleet along the Cape Cod Rail Trail. But it frightens Eric, a little, how he didn’t realize until now that this is their one-week anniversary. He just needs to leave Jack a message, at least, say _something_.

They’ve been together for seven days and in some ways it feels like it’s been so much longer than that. It feels so easy, so familiar, most of the time that Eric struggles during the day -- when they’re both awake and trading texts and sending photographs and Jack’s voice is there on the other end of the line reassuring Eric that Jack is as excited and shy and wanting as Eric is -- to remember what it felt like _before_. When he had been certain that Jack was someone Eric would never be able to claim in this way. That Eric would never, ever be able to say “we” and mean him and Jack.

The night before, Jack had phoned just as Eric was beginning to doze off in bed watching an old episode of _Chef!_ on his laptop.

“How was the beer?” Eric asked, sleepily.

“Good,” Jack responded. “It’s nice to be able to drink without worrying that the campus cops are gonna bust the Haus or some tadpole’s mother is gonna blame me for her son’s irresponsible underage drinking.”

“Is _that_ why you never drank at the kegsters?”

There’d been a nearly imperceptible pause. Eric closed his laptop and rolled over on his back to stare at the yellow glow of the streetlights outside on his ceiling, filtered through the swinging shadows of chestnut leaves blowing in the night breeze. He wondered if the fact he can tell the difference between a hesitation and Jack’s usual quiet deliberateness can be put down to his already-‘swawesome boyfriend skills -- or if anyone who’s played with Jack for two years would be able to tell that there’s something he’s _deciding_.

“You don’t have to--” he began.

“That was part of it,” Jack interrupted. “But I also -- I had some bad experiences when I was younger. Back in the Q. There were rumors, after I overdosed on my meds, that I’d mixed alcohol and party drugs -- all kinds of wild shit.” Eric forced himself to be quiet and still, listening to the tone in Jack’s voice -- sad, a little tight, but determined to share this little shard of himself with Eric. “The truth is actually really boring, Bits. I just had an anxiety disorder that I was really good at hiding. And I was spending most of my time around a bunch of teenagers my own age who didn’t know any better than I did that this wasn’t how it was supposed to feel. And the coaches and host families who were looking out for us -- they’ve actually made some changes since then, my parents pushed them to start mandatory trainings in the league so people know what to look for.”

“That’s good. That’s real good,” Eric murmured, his eyes drifting closed against his best intentions. Jack’s voice is always soothing. Even when Jack is telling him stuff that makes Eric want to kneecap someone with his hockey stick and wrap Jack in his fleeciest fleece blanket and cuddle with him until dawn.

“Yeah, it is. But apart from that, I had a few experiences -- there were times when I drank and -- I ended up doing stuff. Letting people do stuff that seemed like a good idea at the time. Because when you’re a little blurry around the edges it’s harder to come up with a reason why you should say no to someone. Especially when it’s someone you care about impressing?”

“Jack--” Eric had felt his pulse climbing as he remembered standing outside Jack’s bedroom door, the tone in Kent Parson’s voice, the fear and anger in Jack’s. “Jack, did Kent--”  
  
“I wanted … mostly, I wanted to. I wanted _him_.” Jack had almost turned it into a question. “But he only ever let me when -- when we’d been drinking. So. I came up with excuses to. Or exaggerated how much I’d. And I never knew whether--”

“Oh, honey.” Eric felt his heart breaking. He hated the distance between them. Some detached part of himself observed that probably this should be feeling weird, right now? To be on the phone with his boyfriend listening to said boyfriend remember how much he'd wanted to be with -- but somewhat to his own surprise Eric had realized that he doesn't feel the least bit threatened by Kent Parson. Kent Parson ... Kent Parson had made a note creep into Jack's voice that Eric knows he will do everything in his power to keep from ever returning.

It's not even about whether he and Jack are together (although he never wants that to stop being the case), it's purely about never wanting Kent Parson anywhere near Jack. Ever again.

"I wish I could give you a hug right now.”

“Yeah,” Jack said, his voice a little unsteady, “Yeah, me too.”

“ _Fuck_ , this sucks.” Eric laughed, a little unsteadily himself, squeezing the tears from the corners of his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “Not -- _God_ , not you -- not us -- just. I don’t know how I’m gonna make it to August.”

“I’d like to see you before that, too,” Jack offered up, hesitantly. “I don’t -- I don’t know what my training schedule is like yet, but -- maybe I could fly down? Or -- or I could pay for you to fly up to Pawtucket? See my new place? You probably don’t trust me to outfit the kitchen. I--” he cut himself off abruptly, then continued, shyly, “I actually picked the apartment because I thought you might like the kitchen.”

“Jack. You signed that lease back in _April_. Are you saying--?” Eric was pretty sure his tired brain was scrambling the order of things.

“I know.” Again, Eric heard the verbal shrug. “I can’t -- I wasn’t letting myself -- but looking back, Bits -- I knew a long time _before_ I let myself know, eh?”

Now, this morning, as the Legion band marches around the corner and onto the green, Eric ducks around the corner of the public restrooms, out of sight of his mother’s tent, and pulls up Jack’s contact profile on his phone.

He hesitates for a second or two and then presses “call."

“Hey Bits,” Jack answers on the second ring. Eric can hear Alicia and what is probably Bob’s voice in the background.

“Hey,” he hadn’t really been expecting Jack to answer and for a second he’s caught off guard. “Is -- is this a good time? How’s your ride going?”

“It’s a good time, yeah,” Jack must be stepping away from his parents because Alicia’s voice fades, “-- _sure, Mom, I’ll tell him_ \-- Mom says ‘hi’ --” Eric smiles at the long-suffering tone in Jack’s voice. He tries to imagine a future in which his own mother says the same, and like Alicia knows she’s saying hi to Eric’s _boyfriend_. Not just his teammate and Bob Zimmermann’s son.

“Pit stop,” Jack says. “Mile eighteen. We’ll be at the finish line by eleven, probably. But _Papa_ will want to wait to cheer on the others.”

“I’m helping Mama until the end of the day anyway,” Eric says. “The fair opens in another hour. You can probably hear the parade in the background? They’re just starting the flag-raising hoo-ha.”

“That would be the technical term for it.”

“You betcha.” Eric takes a breath. “Jack.”

“Bitty.”

“It’s our one-week anniversary. I just -- I realized. And I wanted to call you.”

“ _Crisse._ ” Jack says softly. “I didn’t --”

“No! No I didn’t -- Please! Don’t feel bad, Jack. I’m not -- I forgot too. I mean, a week, right? It’s stupid even to think of it as a big deal, I just --”

“It’s not stupid,” Jack says, so softly that Eric has to press his free hand over his ear and lean against the white-painted concrete wall of the toilets in order to hear him. Over the loudspeaker across the park the mayor, or someone, is giving a speech and there's a toddler throwing a tantrum in the grass behind him.

“It’s not stupid," Jack repeats firmly. "It just feels -- longer? I can’t believe it’s only been a week.”

Eric laughs, “Right? I still pinch myself every morning when I wake up, just to make sure I’m not dreaming. I can’t believe I’m -- I never thought I’d get the chance, is all. _Lord_ , Jack. I’m so glad you were brave for both of us, yeah?”

“Bitty.” Jack says. “Eric. It wasn’t -- I wasn’t being _brave_.”

“Yeah.” _Damn it._ Eric’s gonna start crying again. And then all these people, some of whom probably remember him from high school, are going to remember him as _that guy, remember him?_ who was sobbing on his cell phone in the middle of Town Park on Memorial Day, 2015.

“Yeah, it was pretty brave, Jack. Believe me. I know. So I just. I wanted to call and say I’m glad you did.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On Kent Parson:
> 
> It seems appropriate to note at this point (because I know some folks have strong feelings one way or the other) that, while I support authors who want to write Kent Parson rehabilitation narratives, this is not that fic. I'm not going to go out of my way to trash Kent as a human being in the present, but his past relationship with Jack (as I am writing it) was emotionally manipulative and I'm not going to write it as a "they were both young and closeted and did stupid shit and wounded each other." Yes, they did. But (again: in THIS version of the story) Kent was also an emotionally manipulative partner. And given his interaction with Jack at the kegster in canon, I'm running with "still hasn't changed his tune a whole lot." Thought it best to give readers a head's up.
> 
> Other Show Notes:
> 
> While I made up the Memorial Day MS charity bike ride, the [Cape Cod Rail Trail](http://www.mass.gov/eea/agencies/dcr/massparks/region-south/cape-cod-rail-trail.html) is a real place, and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society holds a 50 mile [Cape Cod Challenge Walk](http://challengemam.nationalmssociety.org/site/PageServer?pagename=CW_MAM_homepage) every year...so I pilfered.
> 
> [Madison, GA](http://www.madisonga.com/index.aspx?NID=318) has both a Memorial Day parade and a "MadisonFest" arts fair in April, held in Town Park, that I took the liberty of smooshing together for the scene I wanted in today's fic.
> 
> Eric is watching [_Chef!_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chef!) in the flashback scene, starring Lenny Henry, and if you have never seen this show I encourage you to watch it. Our local PBS station ran re-runs of it for awhile during grad school and it is profane and hilarious!


	9. Tuesday, 26 May 2015

“...don’t let them talk you into letting one or both of them ride in the front seat,” Aunt Wendy says, glaring sternly at her daughters, “and I told them they could pick one movie to watch before bed after they brushed their teeth and put on their pajamas. We’ll try to be home around nine, so don’t worry about putting them to bed. ”

“Cousin Jack! Cousin Jack!” Charlotte dances around him. “We can watch Elsa cousin Jack!”

“Elsa, Elsa, Elsa,” sings Helena, almost to herself, as she dances her dolphin-shark (it’s a plush dolphin but for some reason Jack has been unable to determine the entire family refers to it as a shark) along the kitchen counters in the family's rental. “Elsa, Elsa, Elsa.”

Jack looks inquiringly at his aunt, who laughs. “They’re talking about _Frozen_ ,” she says. And then, because Jack apparently doesn’t move fast enough to cover his utterly blank expression, “it’s a Disney movie? Idina Menzel? ‘Let it Go’?”

That rings a faint bell. “I think Bi--I think one of my teammates at Samwell had that song on his playlists.” He’ll have to ask Bitty later, if only because Bitty enjoys teasing him about being clueless about pop music references.

Alicia and Bob and Wendy and Greg are having a couples’ night out because Jack has offered to take Charlotte and Helena to Chatham for a pizza dinner at the Box Office Cafe, which they had done last year and had now (according to the twins) become a _tradition._

It’s a beautiful afternoon, and after Jack secures the girls’ seat belts in the back of his parents’ CRV, makes sure he has his wallet and phone and sunglasses, and everyone’s waved goodbye to everyone else at the top of the drive, they head out.

It’s a forty minute drive down the Cape to Chatham, during which Helena and Charlotte keep up a constant stream of chatter about the kids at their Montessori school back in Albany, the end-of-year school play, what they had for dinner the night before, what they’re looking forward to having for dinner, the characters in _Frozen_ (at least he thinks that’s who they’re talking about), and the inner lives of dolphin-shark and Charlotte’s battered American Girl doll, Merida, who is along for the ride.

Jack’s missed this during his time at Samwell. Being around kids for whom your presence in their lives is mostly incidental. When he was coaching before Samwell he worked with kids ages 5-11 and even though he actually got something resembling a hockey team out of the 8-9 and 10-11 year old groups, his favorite to work with were the 5-7 year olds. Mostly, they were just excited to strap on their skates at the start of every practice and ram around the ice chasing the hockey puck. They couldn’t keep track of who was on what team, and except for a few worryingly-serious ones never bothered to remember the rules. Jack’s main job during practice was to make sure everyone left the ice more or less in one piece and got a juice box and a cookie for their trouble. As long as he kept them fed and safe and let them play on the ice they didn’t care who he was, why he was there, they had no expectations that he make something of his life. They just wanted him to skate with them on the ice and be there to catch them when they stumbled.  
  
Maybe he could talk to George about doing some sort of volunteer work with kids, Jack thinks, as they pass the “Welcome to Chatham, Massachusetts!” sign and he slows to match the posted speed limit. He hadn't really thought about how much he'd missed it until now.

They stop in downtown Chatham first because Jack wants to get a bird identification book at the Yellow Umbrella. He lets the girls each pick out a book too. Helena picks a book about a princess and a pony and Charlotte selects a an illustrated selection of Pippi Longstocking stories that Jack vaguely remembers from his own childhood bookshelf.

“We can read these tonight after the movie,” he says, as he hands over his debit card and to the clerk ringing up their sale.

“Elsa! We’re gonna watch Elsa!” Charlotte tells the clerk. “Because Mom and Dad are on a date and we get to play with cousin Jack.”

“Aren’t you lucky!” the clerk responds with a smile, handing Jack the receipt to sign, and then his card and the books in a bright yellow bag.

They drive to the Box Office Cafe, south of the town center along Route 28. It’s early for the dinner crowd, especially since the cafe is now has a liquor license, but Jack’s happy not to have to wait for a table. They order and then he lets the girls bounce around a bit on the big sofas in the front windows while he nurses a Spindrift iced tea lemonade and checks his phone.

The team chat has been quiet the past few days, with everyone dispersed for the holiday weekend, some of them starting summer jobs. Shitty and Lardo both text him privately, every so often, but they’ve been spending the long weekend up in Burlington, Vermont, and Shitty had explained they were going to be communing with nature and thus would be leaving their cell phones powered down until they got back to Boston. Jack suspects (and Bitty had agreed with him when consulted) that “communing with nature” likely involved levels of nudity potentially unprecedented among the incoming class of Harvard Law. But as Shits and nudity had kind of gone together like two birds of a feather for the past four years, this speculation leaves Jack none the wiser when it comes to Shitty and Lardo’s relationship status.

Then again, since he hasn’t told either of them (and he doesn’t think Bitty has either, since Bitty would probably ask first) that he and Bitty are dating he doesn’t really have any room to gripe about relationship ambiguity.

Bitty’s been antiquing with his mother today, which means that his usual ongoing commentary in both the group and their own private text log is interspersed with photographs of the weirder of his finds. _“Blarf! A New and Exciting Game!”_ reads the most recent image in the group text, Bitty’s hand holding up the cover of a board game box. _Should I get this for the Halloween kegster???_ he’d asked, and of course Ransom and Holster had wholeheartedly approved.

In Jack’s private text log is another photo of battered Kodak manual, _“How to Make Good Pictures.”_ Below the image Bitty had typed the subtitle in all caps: _EVERY PICTURE MAKER SHOULD READ Jack!! I’m buying this for you._

Jack smiles and types back, _I could probably use the help._

“Take a picture cousin Jack,” Charlotte instructs, running up to where he’s sitting at their table and mugging for the camera. They’re interrupted, though, by the waiter who arrives with the order. The girls get plain cheese (their usual) while Jack’s ordered the “Beetlejuice” -- all the menu items have movie-themed names -- a pizza which features vegan chicken, blueberries, and BBQ sauce. He’d ordered it mostly because he imagines how horrified Bitty will be when he sends a photo -- except as he bites into the first piece he realizes it’s surprisingly good.

After they’ve settled into their meal, Jack takes a few photos of the girls as Charlotte had requested and then says, “How about one all together?” They crowd on one side of the table, Charlotte issuing instructions while Helena watches the image on Jack’s screen silently but with great interest. He snaps a few photos in a row, so he can get them all past the plastic smile-for-the-camera stage, reaching around with his free hand to surprise-tickle Charlotte on the ribs. Helena, always the quieter and more self-contained of the two, holds dolphin-shark close and smiles private smiles that Jack suspects only dolphin-shark -- and probably Charlotte -- understand.

“You should put us on Facebook,” Charlotte says next, pulling her orange juice across the table and getting up on her knees on the chair to suck noisily on the straw.

“I don’t use Facebook,” Jack says. Charlotte gapes at him in exaggerated surprise. “But we could send it to your mom and dad?” He definitely knows how to send photos by text. Charlotte allows this would be acceptable and Jack pulls up Aunt Wendy’s contact information and then flips through the images in his gallery until he finds his favorite. Then he sends the text with a note: _C wanted you to know we are having a good time._

He sends the same picture to Bitty ( _dinner in Chatham, maybe next year you’ll be able to join us?_ ) and then for good measure takes a picture of the pizza in front of him and sends that too with the query _You’re the chef. How does a pizza with vegan chicken, blueberries, and BBQ sauce work? Explain._

The emoji that comes back is a little round face with its mouth open wide with laughter and tears pouring out of its eyes.

When they get back to his aunt and uncle’s rental, Jack serves up chocolate pudding cups from the fridge and settles with the girls in front of his laptop where he can stream _Frozen_ with a twin nestled in the crook of each arm -- warm, heavy bodies already drooping with the boneless exhaustion of six-year-olds who’ve been going like perpetual motion machines since sunrise.

They make it about halfway through the movie before first Helena and then Charlotte falls forward into his lap in full-on slumber. He can’t reach the laptop without moving enough to risk waking them, so he lets the movie finish playing through the final credits (and yes, the song was one he remembers from Bitty’s kitchen playlists). The film is surreal in the manner of all Disney films: talking animals, characters that burst into song at startling moments, a plot that gestures toward the Anderson tale he remembers from childhood with a strange blend of ironic commentary and earnest good faith..

As Jack watches it comes back to him -- a half-remembered conversation at the Haus -- that Ransom and Holster had gone to see this movie in the theater on one of their “date nights.” (Everyone on the team has been saying it with air quotes for so long, including Holster and Ransom, that if they ever do ‘fess up to being in each others’ pants Jack thinks the air quotes will probably follow them to their graves.) They’d come home raving about it, and their post-game analysis had turned into a five-way debate between the two of them, Shitty, Lardo, and Bitty, and lasted through the consumption of an entire pan of Bittle brownies. Jack remembers terms like _genderfucked_ and _unabashedly feminist_ and _queering the narrative_. The fact that as he’s watching he finds himself nodding, internally, to the Shitty-like discourse in his head, thinking, _Yeah, this is pretty damn gay_ is probably proof that he’s a) he’s forever scarred from living with Shitty, and b) he’s pretty damn gay and probably just needs to own it. Because Elsa is making him tear up a little, even with his cousins drooling on his thighs. He’s rooting for her.

It’s nice, he thinks, as the credits stop rolling and his laptop screen goes black. It’s nice that kids like Charlotte and Helena have a better chance than he’d had even five, ten years ago, of knowing -- and actually _believing_ \-- that it’s okay to grow up to be someone like Queen Elsa or Uncle Billy and Uncle Yannick, or someone like Bitty, or, well, someone like _Jack_.

It’s still a weird thing to realize, how to kids his cousins age -- even teenagers -- probably think of him as a grown-up now, as someone who’s got his life figured out when he’s still taking it day by day a lot of the time.

But day by day feels a lot less scary than it used to, even a year ago.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Spindrift](http://www.spindriftfresh.com/) is a local Massachusetts seltzer/soda company.
> 
> The book Helena picks out is [The Princess and the Pony](http://www.amazon.com/Princess-Pony-Kate-Beaton/dp/0545637082) by Kate Beaton, which technically didn't hit bookstores until June 30, 2015 but I pushed it forward ~six weeks because I adore this book and felt Helena needed to have it.
> 
> [Yellow Umbrella Books](http://yellowumbrellabooks.net/home/1951169) is a wonderful indie used and new bookshop in Chatham, Massachusetts.
> 
> Sadly, the [Box Office Cafe](http://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/the-box-office-cafe-south-chatham) and DVD rental store closed on January 1, 2015 but my wife and I went there multiple times on our honeymoon and couldn't get enough of the disgusting-sounding-yet-delicious Beetlejuice pizza so I bent the laws of time and kept them open into the summer of that year.
> 
> [Blarf!](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6667/blarf) is, horrifyingly enough, a real board game. I actually owe both of Eric's antique finds to my brother who is a lover of the weird and wacky finds in second-hand, thrift, and antique stores, and unlike Jack has a Facebook account where he does post pictures of some of these delightful items.


	10. Wednesday, 27 May 2015

The day after Memorial Day, a heat wave sweeps across from the central plains into the the mid-Atlantic pushing the heat into the 90s with a low-hanging humidity that makes sweat spring up on Eric’s upper lip at the slightest exertion. He gets up early enough to mow the lawn before breakfast, because he’d promised Coach. Then, after a bowl of cereal and his first cup of coffee, preps the custard for a batch of peach-basil ice cream he’s planning to make for dessert that night. When he’s done with his chores and laboring over the hot stove, he goes back up to the second floor for his first shower of the day.

Coach is still up at the high school through the end of the week -- graduation is on Friday -- and Suzanne has retreated to the relative cool of her below-ground basement workshop to update her Etsy shop and update her accounts based on the sales from yesterday’s fair. Eric has the second floor to himself as he lingers under the cool spray, trying to bring down his core temperature.

He towels off in a cursory fashion and then pads down the hall to his room so he can stand in front of the oscillating fan and dry off the rest of the way -- or try to -- before he just starts to sweat again.

It feels too hot for clothes. He glares into his closet for minute and then retreats to his bed where he lets himself fall back onto the mattress and consider the two plaster cracks that run across the ceiling, intersecting at right angles above his head. He swears they’ve gotten longer since he was in Madison at Christmas.

He checks his phone -- Jack’s taken Charlotte and Helena to the beach -- and wishes he were on the Cape too, where according to his weather app the high today is going to be 73℉.

Jack keeps talking like Eric will be with them next year, folded into what Eric gathers is an annual family reunion. Eric’s trying not to be intimidated by the idea, though it sounds like a very different world from the one he’s used to. Sprawling family gatherings he can handle -- but Jack’s parents own the artsy cottage the three of them are staying in, inherited from Jack’s grandparents, and Alicia’s been “summering” at the Cape since she was a girl. When Eric had asked about their cottage Jack had sent him a link to an article in _New England Home_ in which it had been featured back in 2013. Eric loves every scrap of detail that Jack sends him about what he’s been doing, about his adorable little cousins, about his aunt and uncles -- but he’s worried he won’t be able to measure up. What must Jack’s uncles think of him, for example, a kid from Georgia who can’t even figure out a way to come out to his own parents?

 _Ugh._ He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to force the worries he knows are irrational out of his head. He just ends up making his eye sockets feel hot and sweaty.

“Eric Richard Bittle,” he says firmly to himself, “Get your act together or else that first kiss is gonna be your last.”

He knows it’s not true, even as he’s saying it, but his breath catches, as it always does, at the thought that The Kiss (it floats around in his brain like that, capitalized) -- that one perfect moment of impossible romance -- is all he’ll ever get.

  
He pulls his hands away from his eyes and drops them across his stomach with a sigh. It’s not that Jack hasn’t been -- the first week of being Jack’s boyfriend has been pretty amazing. Eric thinks that maybe the thing that surprises him the most is how _surprising_ Jack is. He’s known Jack for two years and spent a lot of time with him, so some ways it doesn’t feel all that different being Jack’s boyfriend, especially long-distance, than it's felt in recent months being Jack’s friend.

Except that something about being together _this_ way has made Jack start unfolding himself for Eric in these gorgeous, heartbreaking every-day ways.

He does things like tell Eric what birds he saw on his morning runs, cracks jokes about the Vector cereal his parents brought with them from Canada, confesses -- in an adorably baffled tone -- that he’d teared up watching _Frozen_ , and gets excited about the box of his old books that he and Bob had unearthed from the back of the crawl space.

They’ve hardly talked about hockey at all -- though Eric knows Jack’s been doing his weight training and other daily exercises, as well as working his way through everything he can find on the Falconers last few seasons -- and the thing is that Eric’s hardly noticed because there’s always something else to talk about. At some point during Eric's sophomore year they went from being teammates who only had hockey in common to being friends who also played hockey together. And now Eric realizes how much he wants to know _everything_ about Jack, and he can’t imagine ever learning enough that his curiosity is satisfied.

And then there’s … the stuff about Jack that Eric’s dying to know and can’t even _begin_ to ask. He lays awake at night, and sometimes like this in the middle of the day, and thinks about Jack. Naked. About having permission to look -- _really_ look -- at Jack, every inch of him. About having permission to touch and taste and smell -- and be touched and tasted and inhaled right back.

Eric hadn’t known, before this summer, that it was possible to miss something that you haven’t actually had. But it is, because he does. He misses Jack’s hands on his skin. He thinks about how Jack’s palms would feel as Jack caressed his chest, his abs, his belly, gently shifted Eric’s hips, pressed open his thighs. He misses the way Jack's mouth tastes, and how his lips would feel pressed against the hallow of Eric's throat, across his collarbone, Jack's tongue and teeth on his nipples, the way Jack's mouth could -- should -- will leave  _marks_ on his pale, freckled skin. 

Eric doesn’t remember ever being hungry for the touch of another person like he’s suddenly hungry for Jack’s. Eric’s never been a fan of other people getting in his space. He had been the sort of child that adults liked to pick up and cuddle without asking first. Some of his earliest memories involve being grabbed and embraced by the arms and hands of much larger people, virtual strangers, grown-ups at church and members of his extended family. He’d learned early that crying when his grandma smacked a kiss on his cheek wasn’t polite, and that the big boy cousins would taunt him when he avoided playing their rough-and-tumble games.

At school it just intensified, since he was always one of the smallest boys in his grade. There were always kids -- boys, mostly, but sometimes girls too -- ready to pick on the ones who couldn’t physically put up enough of a fight, who went and tattled to the teachers. Eric had learned to keep his head down and not acknowledge the everyday indignities of being tripped and shoved in the hall, of being pinched during class and held under a cold shower in the locker room.

Eric’s spent years trying to avoid the intrusive bodies of other people. It's a fragile, new, and hopeful feeling to realize how desperately he wants -- _needs_ \-- Jack to intrude in every possible way.

He runs his own palm deliberately down the valleys and curves of his abdomen, dipping his thumb into his belly button, letting the tips of his fingers graze the wirey blond hair that springs from his groin. He tips his fingers up and runs the edge of his fingernails down the groove of his hip, where hip meets thigh.

He closes his eyes and imagines that instead of his own hand, this is Jack.

He pulls a knee up, reaches, and runs his palm up the inside of his thigh to his groin, cups himself, still mostly soft, presses down with the heel of his hand, wraps his fingers around and takes measure of himself.

His hand is smaller than Jack’s would be.

_Oh._

His body likes the idea of Jack touching him, here, of Jack’s warm, strong hands pulling, pushing, caressing. Eric shifts, restlessly, against the cotton bedspread. He lifts his hips and digs his heels into the mattress, shoving himself across the bed until his head meets the pillows. Now he’s no longer half-on, half-off the mattress but fully supported -- able to concentrate on where he wants his hands, what he wishes Jack was here to do.

He’s panting, just a little.

It’s not like he _hasn’t_ jerked off to fantasies of Jack, before, of Jack doing things. Of being allowed to do things with Jack. Once, Eric remembers, a particular glimpse of Jack clad only in low-slung boxers making his way to the bathroom on a Saturday morning had fueled his shameful fantasies for _weeks_. He’d imagined following Jack into their second-floor shower and falling to his knees in front of Jack, dragging Jack’s shorts roughly down from the waistband, and just _taking_ what he wanted. Jack, with his fingers digging into Eric’s scalp -- firm but not controlling -- trembling under Eric’s mouth, almost too big to be comfortable, but. But Eric thinks maybe he’d like that, like everything feeling a little too big and a little too hard, that he trusts Jack to play that edge in a way he’s never trusted anyone else before.

It’s _Jack_ after all. And where Jack is concerned, Eric’s been ignoring his own personal boundaries for months.

He’s realized, now, through absence, how much casual physical contact he and Jack have had since the fall. He’d talked himself into believing that it was just because they were friends -- Ransom and Holster cuddled on the couch constantly, right? Shitty sometimes snuggled with Jack in bed -- casual physical contact was just something hockey dudes did, everyone seemed to agree, it was normal.

Except it _wasn’t_ normal for Eric.

Eric _didn’t_ cuddle on the couch or snuggle with friends during sleepovers, drop his feet into his friends’ laps for a foot rub, play footsie under the table, fall asleep on teammates’ shoulders. Eric wasn't in the habit of dropping a hand on just anyone's shoulder as he passed behind where they sat doing homework at the kitchen table.  … Eric didn’t accept foot rubs, except from licensed professionals, or feel comfortable under the weight of someone’s dozing head, or the passing warmth of another person’s hand at the small of his back, or the security of another person’s arms around his shoulders as he wept in happy surprise into the folds of their t-shirt.

Eric didn’t do any of these things … except that (in hindsight) he did them all, with Jack.

His hips are restless, now, pressing down into the mattress as if to pull away from the steady rhythm of his hand loosely wrapped around his own dick. He thinks about how it will feel, to touch Jack in this way, feel Jack’s erection filling out under his touch. Tendrils of _want_ wind themselves around his limbs, holding him in this moment, pulling him away from the heat of the day and the familiar surroundings of his parents’ house, the knowledge that his mother is within earshot, the frustration of distance and the terror of certainty. He wants this, with Jack. And he knows -- as much as anyone can know anything about their own future -- that he wants this to be _it_.

And it’s a little scary how bone-deep that knowledge is. Despite the fact that Jack has never seen him like this: still-damp hair plastered to his forehead, mussed against the pillows, legs trembling, the muscles in his abdomen and belly tight with the orgasm that’s growing under the _press_ and _pull_ of his own fingers. He twists his free hand into the sheet, imagining how Jack might lean over and clasp his hand, hold him gently and relentlessly to the bed as he --

\-- and he’s coming, hard and sudden, with a little choking gasp of surprise that rises up in his throat -- a sound he has just enough cognizance left to bite off before there’s a chance his mother will hear.

His first thought is _fuck_ it’s only quarter to eleven and already he’s managed to make a second shower a necessity for the day.

His second thought is how empty the bed feels without Jack actually here beside him.

His third thought is to wonder whether it’s weird to suddenly feel like the bed you’ve always slept alone in is empty.

When he has enough coordination back to do so without falling off the bed Eric reaches for his discarded towel and mops himself up. Then he tiptoes back down the hall to the bathroom for another quick rinse off.

Then he returns to the bedroom and digs out his phone from the pocket of his discarded jeans. He curls up into his papasan chair in front of the fan and types out several versions of the message he wants to send Jack before hitting send. He settles for:

_Is it weird that I miss touching you?_

Jack texts back almost instantly:

_No. I miss that too._

Eric hesitates for a moment and then responds:

 _You said maybe you could come down to Madison for a visit?_  
_I think I want that_  
_I want to see you_  
_I don’t want to wait until August to kiss you again_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jack's parents' favorite breakfast cereal: [Vector](http://www.kelloggs.ca/en_CA/vector-consumer-brand.html).


	11. Thursday, 28 May 2015

Jack’s in P-town, picking up a gift for Bitty at Under Glass Custom Framing when his cell phone buzzes in his pocket. He steps away from the counter, where the clerk is wrapping his purchase in bubble wrap and butcher paper, and picks up the call.

“Hi Uncle Yannick.”

“Jack!” There’s the sound of hammering in the background, and a power drill; Yannick must be at work. “Your uncle and I would like to have you over for dinner tonight, before you leave for Providence. You free?”

“Uh -- yeah, sure. What time?” Jack glances at the clock behind the counter, but it’s only a few minutes past two. The store had been nice enough to do same-day turnaround for him, for a rush fee, and he’s going from here to the post office to mail it out Priority.

“I’ll be home by five, so dinner’ll be on the table around six? We’re grilling halibut steaks and baby asparagus.”

“Want me to bring anything?”

“No need, unless you want something specific to drink -- Bill’s got his usual range of beer and wine -- we had a nice cider last night, Farnum Hill.”

“Okay.” Jack looks out the front window of the shop back down Commercial Street, considering his options for picking up something to take for dessert. “Sure. I’ll see you between five-thirty, six?”

“We’ll be expecting you!” Yannick hung up and Jack turned back to the counter to collect his parcel, smiling to himself.

He’d been expecting something like this from Yannick since he’d told Uncle Billy about Eric on Sunday. He’d known Billy would tell Yannick, and known Yannick wouldn’t be satisfied with the few details Jack had shared with Bill. This was the “bribe your nephew with food in exchange for relationship details” dinner.

* * *

Jack pulls up to his uncles’ place that evening and finds Uncle Billy out on the side patio tending to the grill, Angus and Fergus flopped at his feet. Through the open window Jack can hear Yannick in the kitchen and _All Things Considered_ warbling away on the radio.

“Had a good day?” Uncle Billy asks, as Jack bends down to scratch Fergus behind the ear. The dog thumps his tail happily in response.

“Yeah. Went for a run with Papa. Drove up to P-town.”

“You guys leave tomorrow for Providence?”

“Pawtucket, actually. Yeah. My lease started May 1st and all my stuff is there -- most of it -- but I haven’t had a chance to unpack. Mom and Papa drive back to Montréal on Sunday.”

“Where in Pawtucket?”

“Near Blackstone Park? It’s an old furniture warehouse they converted to lofts in 2012.”

“Nice neighborhood; I’ve been down there once or twice -- a colleague of mine lives there and commutes up to Boston for classes. Helluva commute, but her husband works at one of the hospitals there, on the nursing staff, so he’s gotta be close to work.”

“I stopped at the Chocolate Sparrow for ice cream?” Jack hefts the insulated bag he’s carrying. “I should put it in the freezer.”

Uncle Billy waves the fork he’s wielding, “Go on -- and tell Yannick the fish’ll be done in another two, three minutes.”

* * *

They eat out on the patio, the citronella candles burning to keep away mosquitoes, and Jack isn’t more than two bites into his halibut before Yannick asks, “So tell us about Eric! He was a teammate of yours at Samwell?”

Jack nods. “On my line, last two years. He’ll be a junior next year. He’s majoring in American Studies with an emphasis on food history and culture.”

“Bill tells me he’s from Georgia, originally?”

“Madison. He’s back there this summer, with his parents. And he works at a summer camp, in the kitchen.”

“Ah, yes,” Yannick smiles nostalgically. “I did that a few years myself -- poison ivy, skinned knees, homesickness, mosquitoes. We used to take the secondary school students out on week-long ‘voyageur’ excursions, packing everything with us, portaging from lake to lake.”

“Bitty -- Eric -- makes it sound like he’ll be in one place? They have day campers and kids who stay overnight. Maybe some of the staff take the kids out into the back woods? But Eric isn’t living there. He says his shifts are generally 12-8pm -- they have a morning crew that does breakfast and lunch, then an afternoon crew that does lunch clean up and dinner.”

“You going down to see him?” Uncle Billy asks, and Jack hears the questions behind the questions.

“I’m hoping to.” He pauses. He’s been looking for a way to have this conversation, actually, but hasn’t known how to start it. So part of him is grateful that his uncles have started it for him. He knows his parents are supportive and trying to give him and Bitty space to work this out; to their credit neither of them have expressed anything but happiness for them both, and interest in Bitty’s summer activities. He knows they still associate his breakdown six years ago with his coming out to them, and worry about the way his relationship with Kent may have precipitated his overdose. On some level, he still harbors the fear that his father will only be able to see his son’s gayness as a potential liability to his hockey career, even though Bob has said absolutely nothing to suggest that’s how he feels. But Jack doesn’t want to bring up the subject with his parents because he’s afraid that by sounding uncertain he’ll make _them_ uncertain.

He trusts his uncles to understand this, though. The complexity of this for both him and Bitty. Uncle Billy’s been out to the family since before Jack was born, but he knows he didn’t tell his parents until after he graduated from college, and that he didn’t talk openly about his partners at work until after he’d been granted tenure. He knows Yannick has a complicated relationship with his mother and stepfather, and that at least one of Yannick’s sisters doesn’t like bringing the kids around when Yannick and Billy go up to Montréal to visit family.

“We’re talking about me going down to Madison to visit,” he says, nodding. “Once I know what my schedule is like, for the summer. I’ll be training pretty intensively, and there’s going to be charity events and things -- but. He’s not due back at Samwell until mid-August, and then we’re both gonna be busy with games and he’s got classes -- so, yeah. We’d like to spend some time together.” He pauses. “The thing is, Eric’s not out to his folks yet. So. We were talking about me going down so -- so he doesn’t have to do that alone.”

Yannick and Uncle Billy exchange a look, nodding. “That’s hard,” Uncle Billy agrees. “He’s worried they’re gonna take it badly?”

Jack shrugs, “I’ve met his mom and they seem really close, but Coach -- his father coaches high school football -- Eric doesn’t think his dad is going to be happy.”

Yannick reaches out and puts a reassuring hand over Jack’s wrist. “I remember that conversation. It’s a hard one. But I also remember the weight off my chest when I finally told my father and didn’t have to hide it anymore.”

Uncle Billy nods. “Are you -- or is he -- worried about physical safety? Is he worried they’re going to cut him off financially?” Jack remembers, suddenly, that Uncle Billy is one of the faculty at Wentworth who has a Safe Space sign on his office door. He wonders if he’s ever had a student who had to weigh either of these concerns. He knows he was lucky, incredibly lucky, in more ways than one and his throat constricts a little. He hasn’t asked Bitty much about what it was like growing up in the South, closeted; whether he knew any kids who were out. He remembers the casual homophobia that he used to think was normal, back in the Q, a bunch of adolescent boys posturing in front of one another and terrified of being seen as anything less than hypermasculine athletes.

It occurs to him for the first time, with an accompanying spike of shame that he’d never thought to ask, that there might be an actual _incident_  behind Bitty's fear of being checked on the ice.

“I -- I don’t think so. He’s never said that’s what he’s worried about,” Jack says. “I should probably ask him.”

“Are you planning on coming out to the team?” Uncle Billy asks, without judgement.

Jack licks his lips. “Yes, I mean, eventually.” He pokes at his fish. “I’m not going -- I don’t want to lie. I haven’t decided what to -- this thing with Eric happened after I signed. So I wasn’t thinking it would be something I’d have to think about right away? But. George -- Georgia Martin -- the assistant GM -- she’s out. She brings her wife to events; they have a little girl. It’s one of the reasons I signed with the Falconers.” _The_ reason, if he’s being honest with himself. That, and the fact that Providence was less than an hour’s drive from Samwell.

He still remembers the day that George came up to Samwell on her first recruiting visit, how she’d sat in the empty stands at Faber watching their morning practice, and then asked him to show her around the campus. They’d gone for a jog through the Ashburton Arb and around the Pond. She’d said her wife -- a Samwell alum -- had told her to be sure and grab a coffee at Annie’s so they’d stopped for lattes before she’d had to hit the road back to Providence. He hadn’t realized until after she left how deliberate her casual mention of her wife, Joelle, had been. How she’d deliberately talked about how she and Joelle had watched his second-year games together while she was on maternity leave with their daughter Emmy.

Lardo had told him, later that week, that George had asked her and some of the others -- Chowder, Ransom, Bitty -- about the locker room culture, about how comfortable they felt at Faber, on the road, about Jack as a captain.

“The Falcs -- the owner, I guess, has a son who’s gay. So when George and some of the other staff and members of the team started talking about making the team a model in the league -- try and prove to the rest of the league that you can be inclusive and not lose good athletes or advertising dollars -- he was open to listening to what they had to say.”

“Fascinating!” Yannick actually looks interested, for once, in the world of professional sports.

“I’m --” Jack clears his throat, nervously. “No one’s actually said this to me, outright? But I think they’re hoping that having Bob Zimmermann’s son on the team, whether I’m a player who happens to be gay or I’m just someone who’s willing to play with gay athletes, will make it harder for the NHL to ignore what they’re doing.”

Uncle Billy looks at Jack shrewdly. “And you’re comfortable with that?”

Jack had been comfortable with it when he knew George wouldn’t push him to self-identify. She’d never actually asked him outright about his orientation. She’d only made it clear in their conversations -- backed up by the code of conduct and anti-harassment policies he’d had to sign -- that his experience on Samwell’s racially diverse team, in a locker room that didn’t tolerate sexist or homophobic speech or behavior was something she, and the rest of the Falconers staff, considered an asset.

Given their policies, he's pretty sure if he goes to George and tells her he's dating Bitty and wants to be out to the team, to the press from day one she wouldn’t bat an eye.

He swallows. “I’m -- I’m not sure yet. It’s -- it’s a lot to think about. And a lot to ask of Eric, too. He’s still in school and -- it’s a lot to think about.”

Again his uncles exchange a look.

“We should come down and meet your Eric this fall,” Yannick says, finally. “We’ll come down to Pawtucket and take you out for dinner, eh?” He doesn’t say it like it’s optional.

Jack feels his shoulders relax, a little. He and Eric can do this. And it’s good to know they don’t have to figure it out all on their own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Under Glass Custom Framing](https://www.facebook.com/Under-Glass-Custom-Framing-175353425826773/) in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
> 
> The [Hot Chocolate Sparrow](http://www.hotchocolatesparrow.com/products.html) in Orleans, Massachusetts, offers all sorts of delicious desserts.
> 
> I picture Yannick and Bill's summer cottage [looking something like this](http://www.weneedavacation.com/Cape-Cod/mamcc/22470-1b.jpg).
> 
> Hey Fletcher_is_a_fangirl, did I get the "eh?" usage right this time?


	12. Friday, 29 May 2015

TFW your barista is a guy you knew in high school 

_Bitty?_  
_Barista?_  
_(Also TFW?)_

* * *

Sorry. Latte came up  
I had Coach drop me off at Park Ave  
*PERK Ave thanks autocorrect  
HS graduation today  
(“that feeling when”)

 _Is that feeling good or bad?_  
_I’m guessing bad._  
_Based on the :-/_

Haha. Yeah  
I dunno  
It’s just weird  
Seeing people who...haven’t really changed?  
I used to be scared of him  
Now he’s pulling espresso shots and selling me stale blueberry scones  
(Really stale. *shudder*)

* * *

_Scared of him?_

Travis was insecure in high school  
He took it out on the easy targets  
*sigh*  
I was an easy target  
At the time

 _Bits._  
_Are you saying he was a bully?_  
_Not okay, Bittle._

  
Oh honey. Yeah. He was a bully  
Not the worst I had to deal with  
Travis was mostly bluster  
Bet you had guys like him in the Q

_So you’re saying he was a homophobic piece of shit._

You’re so sexy when you get protective, Mr. Zimmermann <3

_Bitty._

Yes.  
Yes, I’m saying he was a racist/sexist/homophobic asshole  
We have a lot of those down here  
But the mouthy ones aren’t usually the ones you have to watch out for

 _Bitty._  
_There’s something you’re not telling me Bits._

  
Can we talk about it later?  
It’s easier by phone  
And I can’t call you right now  
I’m at the coffee shop  
(Where are you? Aren’t you driving to Pawtucket today?)

 _Okay._  
_But I want to know._  
_I should have asked before._  
_(We’re waiting for breakfast at Hole In One.)_  
_(Then yes, we’re driving to Pawtucket.)_

Are you excited?  
About Pawtucket I mean not breakfast  
Although breakfast is also good

* * *

Okay, I’m Googling Hole in One and you need to try:  
The honeywheat  
The honey dipped  
Oh and the sour cream

_Bits. I start training next week._

ALL THE MORE REASON TO EAT THEM NOW  
Get your parents to help you eat them  
I’m texting your mother right now

_Why do you have my mother’s phone number?_

She wanted my strawberry-rhubarb crumble recipe  
So your dad DMed my mother  
Who then emailed her my phone number

_...I give up._

ANYWAY  
Your mother says she’ll send a report

 _My mother says to tell you she’ll send a report._  
_Oh._  
_Right._  
_They’re calling our name. Talk to you later._

Talk to you later!  
HONEY DIPPED.

* * *

_Okay, yes. You were right._  
_They were good._  
_I liked the sour cream best._

You did?  
I bet I could make a deeeeeeeelicious sour cream donut

_You know how to make donuts?_

Jack

_I’ve just never seen you make them?_

Jack  
Sweetheart

_Okay! Okay! I get the point._

* * *

There is a Bible study group behind me  
Lord help me I am back in Georgia

* * *

I want pictures of your place when you get there!

_You’ve seen pictures of my place._

  
That your mother sent me while you were apartment hunting.

 _It doesn’t have any furniture yet._  
_We’re going to IKEA tomorrow._

IKEA??  
You just signed a $$$$$$$$$$$ contract with the NHL  
And you’re buying furniture at IKEA??

 _I don’t want anything fancy._  
_What’s wrong with IKEA?_

_Okay. You can help me pick BETTER furniture when you visit in August._

I’m visiting in August?

_...I want you to? Is that okay?_

Yes!  
Yes of course!  
I just. We haven’t talked dates

 _I need to check with George before I can make plans to visit you._  
_I’m sorry._

Honey, don’t apologize! It’s your job  
I have to work too

Second session of camp ends 7/29  
...and I have to be at Samwell for conditioning 8/13  
So I could change my ticket  
Maybe  
Assuming I’ve explained to my folks why…  


_I’ll help pay to change the ticket._  
_If you let me._

* * *

_Are you free to FaceTime?_

Ugh. Not yet. Dinner guests  
Cousins from Atlanta  
Awkward  
I can’t get away until after dessert

 _I wish you were here tonight._  
_It’s weird sleeping in a hotel room alone_.

Your parents got you your own room?

 _They booked a suite._  
_They have the room next door._  
_Papa and I watched the game together and now they’ve gone to bed._  
_I missed watching the game with you._

Oh Lord

_???_

Just...it’s embarrassing to remember  
I tried not to be obvious  
But I was obvious  
I’m pretty sure the whole Haus knew I had a crush on you

_Why do you think that?_

Um.  
Because of the way I let you give me foot rubs while we watched the games?  
Or that time I “fell asleep” with my head in your lap?

_I...was that flirting?_

Was that flirting, he asks

THAT WAS FLIRTING OH MY GOD

 _Oh._  
_I just thought it was …_  
_I thought you thought I was straight?_

I DID  
That didn’t stop me from hopelessly flirting with you  
And you let me  
So I kept … pushing

_It was nice._

It was nice, he says

 _I wish you were here tonight and we could flirt some more._  
_Your feet are nice to hold in my lap._  
_I like how they fit in my hands._

_Maybe I didn’t realize it was flirting._  
_But I still liked it._  
_I’d like to do more._

More?

 _More kissing._  
_More foot rubs._  
_And you falling asleep on me._  
_Only maybe with fewer clothes on this time._

I’M IN MY PARENT’S LIVING ROOM  
WITH COUSIN DOUG AND HIS WIFE ALISON

_I just really miss you Bits._

Me too, Jack

Doug and Alison are gonna leave soon  
You still watching post-game analysis?  
Maybe we can FaceTime in 15-20 minutes?

_I’ll be here._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Hole In One](https://theholecapecod.com/) on Cape Cod has a location in Orleans which is where I picture Jack and his parents stopping for breakfast.
> 
> I've never been to Madison, but thanks Google Maps for identifying [Perk Avenue](http://perkave.com/) as a local coffee shop with WiFi that Eric could hang at.
> 
> I checked and the NHL had playoff games on Friday, 29 May 2015: [See here](https://www.nhl.com/news/stanley-cup-playoffs-notebook-friday-may-29/c-769279). But I'm not getting into hockey details here because I know none.


	13. Saturday, 30 May 2015

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content Note:**  
>  This chapter contains descriptions of Eric's past experiences with homophobic bullying, including physical assault. The descriptions are in the second section (denoted by "oOo") which begins "Eric merged onto I-20..."
> 
>  **THANK YOU**  
>  Oh my gods and goddess, y'all have been SO AMAZING with the love you are giving this fic. This is the first daily writing project like this I've ever attempted and the energy I get back from all of you readers is such a wonderful form of feedback. I can't thank you all enough for your comments and reflections -- each and every one of them helps me think about how to tell this story the way I want to tell it. <3 <3 <3

On Saturday it’s raining when Eric wakes up, a soft steady rain that began sometime in the night after he had said his goodnights to Jack and fallen asleep.

The night had not been a restful one, and he wakes with a sour mouth and a blurry headache -- the punishment of kegster aftermath with none of actual fun. Sleep had been a tangle of confused, unhappy dreams about running naked through the deserted halls of his old high school, trying to get away from the middle school football team -- except they were all wearing hockey gear and skating after him. He woke up several times with his heart pounding and his mouth dry, but never awake enough to untangle himself from the sheets and call Jack -- even though Jack had made him promise to call if talking triggered the nightmares.

He fumbles for his phone and wakes it up with slow fingers. Jack’s already texted to say good morning and to let Eric know he and his parents are off to Stoughton. Eric texts back:

 _Have fun!_  
_Take selfies!_  
_Remember Ransom and Holster’s rule:_  
_no trip to IKEA is complete without buying a stuffed animal_

Then he drags himself out of bed for a shower. He’s in a foul mood and the dim light of the rainy morning is no help. He takes two acetaminophen before brushing his teeth and then goes down to the kitchen for breakfast.

His father is sitting at the kitchen table reading about the Stanley Cup playoffs on his tablet and eating his usual half grapefruit and bowl of shredded wheat. It’s the only breakfast Eric can remember his father eating on days when breakfast is not a family affair.

Coach has kept up with NCAA hockey since Eric started at Samwell and now, apparently, follows the professional leagues as well. At least he and Jack will have something to talk about, Eric thinks glumly. Maybe the fact that Eric’s gay will be overshadowed by the fact that he’s dating a professional hockey player -- someone whose masculinity his father might finally find unimpeachable and understandable.

Eric can feel his throat closing up, a tightness in his chest, and realizes that if the day is going to improve he’s going to need a change of scene.

“Y’all mind if I take the car and drive up to Phipps Plaza?”

“As long as you fill ‘er up on the way home,” Coach responds. “I’d thought to start work on the back fence today but with this weather it’ll have to wait.”

“You or Mama need me to pick up anything on my way home?”

“Ask your mother,” Coach says, nodding toward the basement stairs. “I imagine she’s plans for dinner. But there’s always something.”

Eric scrolls through the movie listings on his phone while he lingers over his coffee and toast, waiting for the painkiller to clear his head. The AMC at Phipps Plaza is playing all the big blockbusters so he’ll have his pick of pretty boys as super heroes, pretty boys as action heroes, the new _Pitch Perfect_... anything to just turn his brain off for a few hours and forget about being back in Georgia.

* * *

He merges onto I-20 less than an hour later with Halestorm for moral support and a second cup of coffee in a Camp Oconee travel mug beside him. The further he gets from Madison, alone in the cab of his father’s truck, the easier it is to feel like himself in the _now_ \-- Bitty, twenty-year-old hockey player, rising Samwell junior, with a vlog that has several thousand subscribers, and a boyfriend who can’t wait to see him -- rather than himself _back then_.

The conversation with Jack the night before hadn’t been easy, even though he’d had most of the day to think about how to explain.

He’d worried that Jack wouldn’t understand, that he’d think Eric was making a big deal out of nothing -- Jack had grown up in quasi-professional locker rooms, after all. Jack, who’d been impatient with Eric’s thing about checking. He’d probably just think if only Eric were more … assertive … or worked harder to … fit in … he would have made himself less of a target.

So he’d tried to explain, preemptively, with his usual torrent of words, what it had been like in sixth and seventh grades. The way a couple of ringleaders from the football team had latched onto the fact he was a figure skater and would wait to ambush him in the halls. They always managed to corner him when no-one but their own hangers-on were around. There were never any witnesses he could look to for support. They’d give him shit about how he was so small he probably competed against the _girls_ \-- and the girls probably out-skated him. About how he was a fag who probably fantasized about skating doubles with another fag because then he’d get to be "the girl." How he’d probably come all over himself every time his partner picked him up.

He told Jack about how they’d escalated in seventh grade, when they were physically bigger and stronger than they had been the year before. How Ty and Ricky would grab him and pretend-lift him up as if they were going to throw him into a spin -- except they’d just used it as an excuse to grope him and then joke about how small he was, how he’d just have to take it in the ass because no one would ever be satisfied with --

“Bitty -- _Bitty_.” Jack had interrupted Eric’s flood of words.

“--the time they locked me in the utility closet after sixth period and my parents were so freaked out when I didn’t come home from school that they tried to file a missing persons’ -- Jack?”

“I can’t -- why didn’t we _know_ this? Why didn’t _I_ know this?” He’d sounded angry, and part of Eric had shrunk back from the sound. Even though he trusted that Jack wasn’t angry at _him_.

“I -- what do you mean?”

“Bits -- we were your teammates for _two years_. I was your _captain_. This is why you have trouble with the checking, isn’t it? I thought you were just -- if I’d known I would have --”

“Would have _what_ , Jack?” Eric sounded pleading even to his own ears. “My scholarship at Samwell is conditional on my being able to play. Being able to deal with checking is part of playing. If I’d told you and Hall and Murray y’all would probably’ve stopped pushing me and I -- I wouldn’t have made the progress I did -- and I could have lost my place on the team, and my scholarship. Jack." He stops to drag in a ragged breath.

"I _needed_ to stay at Samwell. It’s the only way I was ever getting out of Georgia.”

Jack swore under his breath in what Eric suspected was Québecois, then said: “At least tell me you know you didn’t deserve any of that. That it wasn’t your fault, that it wasn’t anything you did or didn’t do. Please. Tell me you know that.”

Eric had opened his mouth. Then closed it again. Then drawn a shaky breath. “I--”

“Did your parents know?” Jack asked. “They must have known after--”

“--they knew after -- after the utility closet.” Eric still remembers how kind Mr. Hernandez the janitor had been, how he’d made Eric hot chocolate made using the Keurig in the staff lounge, and hovered in the background as Eric had borrowed Mr. Hernandez’s cell phone to call his parents. Eric himself had been too exhausted and numb at that point to be very responsive, but he had baked Mr. Hernandez a peach-apple pie the following weekend in thanks.

“Ty and Ricky and three other guys who’d been there got suspended for two weeks, and benched for the rest of the season but -- I couldn’t go back there, so. I finished the last month of seventh grade at home. My parents were looking into charter and private school options when Coach got recruited to go to Morgan County and we moved up to Madison.”

“Where Travis started harassing you.”

Eric had sighed.

* * *

He ends up going to see the 10:20am matinee showing of _Furious 7_ even though he’d already gone to see it once with Ransom and Holster and Lardo on opening weekend. He needs the rush of fast cars and the infusion of uncomplicated joy that comes from watching Vin Diesel eyefuck everyone on the cast.

Once again, Paul Walker’s death is a twist to the gut. But Eric’s been shipping Dom Toretto and Brian O’Connor since before he had words for how he felt when they looked at each other over the sleek jumped-up body of their latest car. So he can’t help but feel that it’s a fitting tribute to the actor to be watching his final performance multiple times, weeping freely into his box of jujubes in the near-deserted theatre.

* * *

He gets home mid-afternoon feeling a bit more his current self than he when he’d woken up that morning. He carries the groceries Suzanne had requested into the kitchen and is unpacking them when his mother comes up from the basement.

“Dickey? You have a good time at the movies?”

“I did,” he pulls the blackstrap molasses out of the bottom of the paper bag. “You still keep this in the cupboard over here?”

“Third shelf up, by the honey and corn syrup,” Suzanne nods. “There’s a package for you, came Priority -- Mr. Kim had me sign for it.” She washing her hands at the sink and nods to the countertop by the telephone, where Eric sees a flat rate Priority mail box, slightly battered from its journey, sitting under a few pieces of junk mail.

He extracts the box and sees it was mailed from Provincetown but with Jack’s Pawtucket return address on the label. Jack’s angular printing -- _J. Zimmermann_ and _Eric Bittle_ \-- is unmistakable. He must have gotten the Bittles' address from Alicia.

“You order something?” Suzanne asks, making conversation.

“No I -- it’s from Jack.” Jack hadn’t mentioned sending Eric anything.

“He still with Alicia and Bob up on Cape Cod?” Suzanne asks, “When does he start his new job with the NHL?”

“His contract starts Monday, June 1st--” Eric says absently.

He pulls out his phone. _You sent me a present?_

Jack’s home from IKEA and currently wrestling the bed frame he’d picked out -- it doesn’t escape Eric’s notice that he decided on a queen-sized mattress -- into submission with Alicia’s help. (Apparently mother and son agreed that Bob was a liability when it came to D.I.Y. projects and he had been sent out in search of dinner.)

Jack had also sent a “selfie” of the stuffed animal he had acquired, per instructions, to the group text:

The team was currently engaged in a lively debate over what the elephant’s name should be.

 _I sent you a present._ Jack texts back. _Something I wanted you to have._

 _I should open it now?_ Eric asks.

 _It’s sort of an anniversary present._  
_Our one-week anniversary._  
_Even though it’s late._

Eric considers opening the box standing where he is in the kitchen, but then worries that its contents will be somehow ... incriminating. So he takes a chilled soda from the fridge and retreats to his room before getting out a pair of scissors and prying the adhesive flaps of the box open to extract the contents.

Whatever Jack has sent him is heavily padded with bubble wrap and beneath that in white butcher paper and string. He cuts the string rather than untying the knots and pushes the paper away to reveal a picture frame. He’s opened the package upside down and he sees first the brown paper backing of the frame, the tiny studio label at the bottom and a twist of hanging wire screwed to the top edge.

He turns the frame over carefully, fingers light on the edge to avoid touching what he can tell is glass, and sees himself.

It’s a photograph of Eric taken sometime during the past spring, in the Haus kitchen. He thinks, looking at the image blankly, that he remembers the day -- remembers Jack with his camera taking pictures while they talk about Jack’s senior thesis research, about the rom com Holster had made them watch the night before, about the frittata recipe Eric had been testing out for a possible vlog episode.

No single exchange had been responsible for the expression of utter contentment -- of _joy_ and _thereness_ \-- that Eric now sees in his own face as he cradles the frame between his palms. He remembers a couple of other photographs in this series had made it into Jack’s final project presentation. One of Eric’s hands with the knife, cutting bell peppers; one of Chowder gesticulating with a fork as he tasted the results of Eric’s labors.

But this one -- this one is an image Eric has never seen before.

And as he looks at the photograph, Eric slowly realizes why. Because the look in Eric’s face, as he turns towards away from the cutting board to respond to something Jack has said from behind the camera, is one of pure _love_. It’s an utterly private, unguarded moment between the two of them -- one of hundreds they shared in the Haus kitchen over the course of the past year without even realizing it -- that Jack inadvertently caught on film.

Eric realizes what he’s holding in his hands is a wordless love letter.

He can’t sit still and he can’t actually look at himself a second longer -- it’s all too raw -- so he drops the picture on the bed and stands up, physically walking away from the tidal wave of emotion that overtakes him with such force that he’s trembling all over.

“Oh -- Oh my god, oh my god, _OhMyGod_ \--” he finds himself chanting under his breath as he circles the room, shaking out his hands at the wrists, trying to burn off the adrenaline that’s flooded his system. “Oh, oh, oh, Jack, Jack, Jack, oh, Jack _honey_ \--”

When he can control his fingers, he pulls out his phone and manages to enter his passcode and put a call through to Jack.

Jack picks up the phone sounding slightly breathless, hesitant. “Bitty?”

“Oh my god,” Eric manages, though it’s a rough whisper pushed through tears that are too fucking close to the surface today. “I love you and I miss you _so much_. So, _so much_ , Jack.”

“I love you and I miss you, too, Bits.” Jack echoes back, like a promise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If y'all care, [Phipps Plaza](http://www.exploregeorgia.org/listing/3584-phipps-plaza) is a place, about an hour away from Madison.
> 
> Of course Eric needs Halestorm's [Here's to Us](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KC0DNLDXJW8) to get him through this particular day.
> 
> [Fast 7](http://www.movieinsider.com/m9768/fast-seven) came out 3 April 2015 and you know Ransom and Holster made plans to see it THAT DAY. 
> 
> EVERYONE NEEDS A [CHARMTROLL](http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60294660/). I'm currently taking suggestions for what the team ends up naming Jack's CHARMTROLL (and which current or former team member comes up with the winning name).


	14. Sunday, 31 May 2015

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is my fulfillment of the May [Twelve in Twelve 2016](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TwelveInTwelve2016) challenge (a fic involving a recipe).

Jack watches his parents’ car pull out of the parking lot, his mother’s hand waving out the open window as they start their long drive back to Montréal. They’ll be returning to Providence for his season opener in the fall, but October suddenly feels like a long way away.

He enters his passcode at the side entrance of his building and nods to the guy on duty at the concierge desk on his way to the stairwell. He turns left into the hall on the second floor and then left again into the strange one-bedroom apartment he’s now supposed to call home.

As the door swings shut behind him, Jack realizes that he has absolutely no idea what to do with the rest of his day.

Tomorrow he’s due at the Falconers' morning practice, then has a week chock-full of daunting meetings -- Georgia’s assistant Ben had emailed him the itinerary -- with various administrators, the H.R. department, the P.R. department, the medical staff, the team nutritionist, a photographer for promotional images, some sort of financial advisor. He thinks he even has lunch with Frank Ames, the team owner, and a few of the corporate sponsors on Thursday.

He hasn’t wanted to think about any of that so has let the emails languish in his Inbox without more than a cursory glance to make sure he knows where he needs to be at 7:30 tomorrow morning, and what he needs to bring with him. If he considers his first week, his first month, his first _season_ as a whole the panic starts to set in.

But that chapter of his life starts tomorrow, and it’s still only quarter of ten in the morning _today._

He looks blankly around his one-bedroom apartment. Thanks mostly to his mother’s insistence yesterday, they’d unboxed and constructed all of his furniture as soon as the delivery truck had arrived. He now has a sofa and an armchair, a desk in front of the high factory windows that will let slanting afternoon sun into the main living area. Module bookshelves. A kitchen table and chairs. The bed and a chest of drawers in the bedroom, two bedside tables and reading lamps. Tucked here and there are reminders of his life at the Haus -- his desk lamp, several boxes of books, the rag rugs he’d originally brought with him from his parents' house to Samwell four years ago and now here.

Eric’s at church with his parents until eleven thirty, so Jack’s phone has gone quiet. Lardo and Shitty and Ransom are on the group text arguing good-naturedly about whether or not _Histoire de Babar_ is unredeemable white imperialist nostalgia disguised as children’s literature. He scrolls back up the chat and realizes that they’re debating what he should name the little elephant plushie he’d bought yesterday.

“What do you think,” he says, in French, to the little plushie sitting where he’d left it on the island counter in the kitchen. “Are you a Babar?” The elephant is non-committal.

He decides to go for a run, even though he and his father already did a leisurely couple of miles around Swan Point Cemetery before breakfast that morning. Normally when his brain starts to buzz like this, movement helps.

When he and his mother had come down to Rhode Island in April to find Jack a place to live, the real estate agent had shown them a whirlwind of apartments and neighborhoods -- most of them closer to the Falconers' facilities than the Parkman Lofts where Jack decided to live. Something about the sleek new luxury condo developments they’d looked at in Providence made him feel like he couldn’t breathe. Pawtucket is quieter, smaller; its 1920s subdivisions and green spaces remind Jack of Samwell. His building is a little less than half a mile from the entrance to Blackstone Boulevard, a long winding park with a walking trail Jack can jog along.

He’s far from the only runner out this Sunday morning, in addition to dog walkers, cyclists, what looks to be the start of a children’s birthday party. He runs all the way from Linnett Park to Blackstone Park before turning back. The day before, when he and his parents had driven past on their way back from IKEA, the wedge of Linnett Park had been filled with little white tents that remind Jack of the pictures Bitty had sent from the Memorial Day fair down in Madison. He wonders if it was a one-off event or whether there’s some sort of market here he and Bitty could visit when Bitty comes to stay.

Moving makes thinking easier for Jack. He’s always felt the most calm when his body is busy _doing_ and today is no exception. He weaves around eager dogs and runaway toddlers on tricycles and it's almost like being back on campus dodging oblivious students glued to their phones.

As he runs he lets himself think about Bitty, lets himself imagine Bitty as part of this strange new chapter of his life. He’d stood in the IKEA showroom the day before, baffled by the number of options for mattresses and bed frames, and realized the only thing he cared about was having a bed where he and Bitty could sleep comfortably together when Bitty came to stay. After that, buying two bedside tables and two reading lamps had just seemed obvious. 

Thinking about Bitty helps clear the static in his mind as well.

He’s been struggling since Friday night with a fierce desire to ask Bitty to come spend the summer in Rhode Island. He wants to get Eric away from Madison where it doesn’t feel like he’s really safe any longer. Jack wants him _here_ , where he doesn’t have to think about Bitty bumping unexpectedly into people who’ve hurt him; wants him here so Jack doesn’t have to listen to the waver in Bitty’s voice as he tries not to run from the memories.

He also wants Bitty here so that when he has to face the players and the journalists and the staffers who all think they know bits and pieces of Jack Zimmermann’s story, he’ll have someone to come home to who doesn’t look at him and see tabloid headlines.

He knows it’s selfish, and unrealistic. He _knows_ Eric is capable of taking care of himself. He just hates that he has to. For now.

Keeping his body in motion helps, like it always does.

* * *

He realizes when he gets back to the apartment that he should probably get some food.

His gleaming, brand-new brushed steel refrigerator is humming quietly to itself, empty but for the leftovers from the dinner Bob had picked up for them the night before. So he showers and goes out to his car and drives back down the length of the Boulevard to the Eastside Market to buy groceries.

Eastside Market is smaller than the Murder Stop & Shop but unfamiliar in its layout. He’d been feeling better after his run, but the fluorescent lights and the pop music piped through tinny speakers feels assaulting. The aisles are crowded with people doing their weekly shopping and suddenly Jack can’t think of a single thing to buy.

What do people eat? What should _he_ be eating?

He remembers his first few months at Samwell when the dining halls full of eighteen-to-twenty-two-year olds had felt too much like being back in the Q, always surrounded by people his own age. His parents had helped him secure a single in one of the dorms, so at least he’d had some privacy, but he’d found it hard to be in unstructured public spaces. He knew what to expect among teammates at Faber, or on the road, and he’d settled into the structure of his college classes fast enough. But until mid-October he’d avoided going to the dining halls -- unless Shitty dragged him there -- because they were too chaotic. Instead, he’d kept nutritional drinks in the tiny fridge below his desk and lived off those.

Maybe he’ll just buy a few cases of Ensure and --

He sighs and pulls out his phone to call Bitty.

“I’m at the grocery store,” he says when Eric picks up. “Tell me what I should buy.”

“Jack!” He’s always slightly thrown by how delighted Bitty sounds to be talking to him. “Did you see Shitty’s vetoed ‘Babar’ and now Ransom is pouting? Lardo says that if Shitty’s looking for an anti-imperialist elephant name, ‘Tembo’ means elephant in Swahili. And, let’s see, Holster says --”

“His name is Monsieur Éléphant,” Jack says, realizing as he says it that this is the obvious choice. “And he asks when are you bringing Señor Bunny to visit?”

“Oh my _Lord_ , Jack. You do realize the boys will never stop chirping you for that?”

“Focus, Bittle. I need food.”

“Ah, well, you’ve called the right man haven’t you, Mr. Zimmermann?” Jack can almost hear Bitty settle into the groove of grocery shopping even though he’s not even standing in the store. “So tell me, what aisle are you standing in?”

Jack ignores the glares of shoppers who think he’s being rude shopping while talking on his phone and navigates his cart down each aisle one-handed while Bitty talks him through stocking up on basic ingredients and things he can eat quickly or with minimal preparation. (Even so, when he passes the nutritional supplements aisle, Jack adds a pack of protein drinks to the cart for good measure -- as back-up, he tells himself.)

“So what’s for dinner tonight, Mr. Zimmermann?” Bitty asks, interrupting his own narration of their oddly-joint shopping trip.

“Dinner?” Jack echoes blankly.

“Goodness, Jack! It’s your first night in that gorgeous kitchen! What are you gonna christen it with?”

“Um--” Jack scrabbles around in his brain trying to think of something he can suggest. “What about that egg-tomato thing you make?”

“Egg-tomato thing...” Bitty repeats it, almost like a question, “--oh! Shakshuka?”

“Is that the one with the feta?”

“Yes! Oh, honey, that’s _easy_. Let me…” Jack can hear Eric rummaging around somewhere. “Here, I knew I’d packed that cookbook -- uh, let’s see.” He pulls his cart over out of the way of the woman juggling an infant and a toddler down the aisle full of tinned foods and waits while Bitty hums his way through the index of whatever cookbook he’s reading.

“Ha -- yes, here. Okay. You’re gonna need -- we were just in the baking aisle, right? You’ll need to go back for a couple of spices.”

Jack smiles as he wrestles the cart back around and heads off in search of paprika and cumin. He’s already thinking about the photo he’s going to take tonight with himself and Monsieur Éléphant sadly sharing a plate of poached eggs, tomato, and warm pita bread, captioned “Wish you were here!” and posted to the group text.

Then he’ll be sending a second, more private one to Bitty later that night: One of Monsieur Éléphant tucked into Bitty’s side of the bed, next to Jack own head, keeping Bitty’s pillow warm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Blackstone Boulevard](http://www.blackstoneparksconservancy.org/) is an actual park in Providence, right across the town boundary from Pawtucket. Georgia and Joelle live near here as well.
> 
> The farmer's market Jack and his parents pass by is the [Hope Street Market](http://www.hopestreetmarket.com/)
> 
> Bitty has the Smitten Kitchen cookbook, and [this is their Shakshuka recipe](http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2010/04/shakshuka/) which is delicious.
> 
> And thank you all for the naming suggestions! I think I got a shout-out to everyone who suggested specific names and/or naming rights. iLock's suggestion won by family consensus.


	15. Monday, 1 June 2015

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mixing it up a little today with some Shitty & Lardo (Shitty/Lardo??) in Boston.

Lardo’s least-favorite thing about her summer job is the fact that she’s expected to wear skirts and heels to work every day.

Her second least-favorite thing is the rush-hour commute from Quincy Center to Park Street in the morning, and then Park Street back to Quincy Center in the evening where she has to call her kid brother to pick her up in the family car. She stands in the crowded subway cars with her headphones on, her iced coffee in one hand, and fantasizes about using those heels on the instep of every dudebro businessman who walks into her like she’s not only short but actually insubstantial. The glare mostly works.

The gallery where Lardo is working is high-end, at the bottom of Newbury Street, nestled between a boutique tailor and a place that sells designer leathergoods. The gallery owner’s taste trends toward the conventional but she’s been in the business for nearly thirty years and Lardo’s there to learn how to sell art not find inspiration as an artist. She’s keenly aware that it was Alicia Zimmermann’s introduction, more than her own resume, that had gotten her an interview -- although she’s proud of the way she’d pitched her experience as team manager for Samwell Men’s Hockey as applicable to the job. Now that she’s in the door, this job will be on her resume and hopefully mean no more summers working morning shifts at Dunkin’ Donuts for a few quarters above minimum wage.

So Lardo’s holding her tongue, wearing the heels, soaking in every last detail of Ms. Claiborne’s negotiations with her artists and admiring her smooth-as-silk cultivation of budding and experienced art collectors alike.

They might have taste in their feet, some of them, but they also have an alarming amount of money to spare -- and occasionally someone walks through the door who doesn’t look like they’re about to ask if Lardo understands English. In her first full week she’d even had a surprisingly enthusiastic exchange with a young man who worked for Microsoft about religious iconography in modern Ethiopian art.

What she _isn’t_ expecting, on her second Monday on the job, is for Shitty to walk through the door.

She sees the movement out of the corner of her eye, the shadow that means someone’s about to push open the gallery door, and glances up guiltily from where she’s been surreptitiously scrolling checking her phone beneath the counter. (It’s Jack’s first day with the Falconers and even though he’s been quiet in the group chat that hasn’t stopped the team from chirping him in his absence.) Ms. Claiborne is closeted away with an artist to discuss the terms of their gallery contract and the gallery has few drop-ins before noon. Lardo’s main tasks for the morning involve signing for deliveries, answering the phone, and doing any clerical tasks Ms. Claiborne requires her assistance on.

Shitty knows all of this, of course, because she texts him during downtime.

“Lards!” He says, grinning from behind the douchebag designer sunglasses he’s wearing despite the overcast day. ( _When did Shitty acquire douchebag designer sunglasses?_ Lardo wonders. _They make him look like a B-list Italian porn star from the Seventies._ )

“Shh.” She hisses at him, glancing toward the closed office door. The gallery space echoes and she doesn’t think Ms. Claiborne will take kindly to friends dropping in for a visit, lowering the real estate values just by being there. Although -- she gives Shitty a once-over and realizes that the douchebag sunglasses are part of a whole … l _ook_ he’s got going. Polo t-shirt, tailored pants, designer sandals.

“Dude. What the fuck?” She arches what she hopes is an obviously skeptical (yet graceful, maybe a little sexy?) eyebrow.

“I was, you know,” Shitty gestures expansively with the coffee cup he’s carrying. “In the area. Shopping. Like the man of leisure that I am, the gad-about-town, the social parasite, the --” her eyebrow must have risen higher because he winks. “Ahem, well. My brother and his fiancee are in town and she’s got some…” he makes a complicatedly dismissive gesture with his free hand, “...beauty thing? Consultation? Fitting? I can’t keep all the heteronormative wedding bullshit straight. I’ve been seconded into being Dave’s best man -- he fucking begged me, Lards, there might have been crying involved. I mean. I’d given him some of my best shit but -- still. There was weeping. It was touching. I was weak. I said yes. So now there’s a tux with my name on it three doors down but that appointment’s not until eleven so--”

Lardo’s still got her finger poised above the touchscreen of her phone, momentarily thrown by the fact that Shitty had just been pretending to be Jack at his first presser in the group text and now he was standing in front of her. They haven’t seen each other, what with one thing and another, since graduation. She’d gone to dinner with him and his folks as a safety measure (his _family’s_ safety, he’d insisted, since he was likely to do someone bodily harm if she wasn’t there to keep him in check) and then there had been an awkward and sweet and utterly painful goodbye-not-goodbye when he walked her to the T stop at Hynes so she could catch the train home.

They’ve talked a lot since, but not about the things Lardo wants to muster up the courage to ask. They’ve just done a lot of bullshitting about her job and his family and hung out virtually with various constellations of the team. She hadn’t forgotten he was spending the summer in Hyannis, obviously, but she’d willed herself to deny it. Not to suggest they hang out too soon out of the fear that she’ll come across as clingy.

But now here he is, leaning on the desk in his best impression of smarmy rich asshole, and sliding his coffee cup over to her: “Au Lait with a dusting of cinnamon, just like you like it,” he says, pushing his sunglasses up into his (mournfully short) hair. “So, Lards, come rescue me? You get a lunch break?”

Before she can answer, the office door opens and Ms. Claiborne is ushering the artist out, shaking hands, wishing them a good flight back to Austin in the morning.

Ms. Claiborne glances sharply at their tableau -- Shitty has straightened so that his posture is less _playboy_ but the coffee is still sitting on the glass countertop between them and Lardo can feel her own expression is trending towards pissed at being interrupted.

Maris Claiborne is nothing but a saleswoman, though, so after seeing her artist out to the front steps, she returns with a smile and an extended hand.

“Maris Claiborne,” she introduces herself, “Welcome. I trust Larissa, here, has offered you tea? Coffee?”

“Brooks Knight,” Shitty puts out his hand, and Lardo gapes because it’s the first time she’s ever heard him willingly refer to himself by his given name. “We’ve met before -- my father is Devon Knight? He and his wife Lisa were at the opening of Keris Williams show last November. I was home for Thanksgiving and tagged along.” He shrugs. “I was in town with my brother and soon-to-be sister-in-law and thought I’d drop in and see what other artists you’re working with.”

Lardo watches, fascinated, as Shitty -- playing some alternate version of himself as _Brooks_ the Harvard Law man -- draws her boss away from the counter and into the depths of the gallery. He’s talking composition, texture, and volume like a champ and she’s proud and a little embarrassed to hear her own phrases tumbling out of his mouth. _He actually listened while I was drawing him_ , she thinks. He’s spinning out a story about needing a wedding gift for a couple whose wedding he’ll be attending that weekend on Martha’s Vineyard and _what do you get for the couple with absolutely everything_? You buy them original art, of course.

He sweet-talks his way out of the gallery (and diverts Ms. Claiborne's attention from their possible fraternization) without actually making a purchase, nodding cordially to Lardo on his way out as if he’s just one of those guys who’s compulsively polite to everyone.

She smothers a grin.

Then she can’t help the genuine smile that spreads across her face when a text alert pops up as soon as Shitty’s out of sight of the plate glass windows.

* * *

They meet up for lunch when Ms. Claiborne emerges from her office at noon to give Lardo her break. They only have thirty minutes but Shitty’s waiting with grilled cheese sandwiches from the Roxy’s truck parked on Clarendon Street. They cross Arlington to the Public Garden where they sit by the pond, despite the fact that it’s cold and drizzling slightly, to watch the duck boats circle under grey skies and feed their crusts to the ducks.

“You heard anything from Jack?” Lardo asks, letting herself huddle against Shitty beneath the umbrella he’s holding above both of them. He’s letting her get away with pretending she isn’t huddling.

“Talked to him last night,” Shitty says. “Brah seems good. Lonely. You wanna road trip it down to Providence with me and surprise him some weekend? I told him we’d go visit.”

“You want me to come?” Lardo tries to cover her surprise with, “Hell’s yeah, let’s do it. Dude needs his bros.”

Shitty nods, solemnly, chewing on the second half of his grilled cheese sandwich. He’s gotten cheese on his ‘stache and Lardo resists the urge to reach up with her thumb and wipe at his upper lip.

She sighs, internally.

“What about Bitty?” She asks, to distract herself. “You heard much from him since he went back to Madison?” Something’s seemed a little off about Bitty’s presence in the group chat lately. He’s been quieter than usual, Lardo thinks. Or maybe it’s just that so much of Bitty’s presence is about the smells and sounds of him baking in the kitchen.

Except his Twitter’s gone pretty silent too.

Shitty thinks for a moment before answering. Lardo likes this about him. He’s loud and theatrical when he wants to be, but he also knows not to answer her serious questions in haste. And the two of them are used to tag-teaming the welfare of their teammates.

“Maybe you should ask him,” Shitty elbows Lardo gently in the side. “I haven’t talked to him outside of the group chat. Maybe it’s just Madison. Little brah isn’t out down there, remember? All that conformativity’s gotta wear on a guy.”

“Mmm. Yeah. Maybe.” Lardo agrees that Bitty hasn’t been _unlike_ himself via chat. He’s just less at the center of things than she’d grown accustomed to during his sophomore year. “Hey, did you see Jack named his elephant _Monsieur Éléphant_? Do you think dude’s chirping Bitty?”

“Or _flirting_ with him.”

“Oh, _god_ ,” Lardo groans. “Do _not_ remind me. Boy’s going to be _hopeless_ next fall.” She kicks Shitty’s ankle lightly with the sharp edge of her open-toed heels.

“I still hold what those two need is some pot brownies. A little feel-good weed to loosen ‘em up and they’ll sort it out.”

Lardo glares up at him. “They spent _how many_ months in the Haus kitchen together without sorting their shit? You wouldn’t be so blasé if you were the one living across the hall from Bitty 'I listen to Beyoncé at top volume when I’m being emo' Bittle.”

Shitty snorts, brushing the crumbs of his now-eaten sandwich off his lap and pulling Lardo to her feet. “Have a little faith, Lards,” he says. “And, if faith doesn’t work, we got their backs.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While Lardo's gallery is a complete fiction, as is Maris Claiborne, [Roxy's Grilled Cheese](http://www.roxysgrilledcheese.com/) is one of Boston's most beloved food trucks and is known to park around Copley Square / Clarendon Street at lunchtime.
> 
> It was also 58 degrees and rainy on 1 June 2015 here in Boston; I happened to be reviewing some notes at work this morning about a program we ran that day which mentioned the weather was cold and wet. Poor Lardo! But I had to get them out to the park away from Maris for their lunch.


	16. Tuesday, 2 June 2015

On his second day, Jack isn’t even sure he should be driving as he navigates Providence rush hour on what is likely not at all the most efficient route back to Parkman. He turns the radio on in the rink’s parking garage and then has to turn it off again because even at a burble it’s an unbearable distraction from the tangle of street corners and bumper-to-bumper traffic and unfamiliar signals.

He’s relieved when he pulls into his parking space at the lofts and can cut the engine. He drags his messenger bag out of the passenger seat and goes in without even checking his mail because then he’d have to say “hi” to the Ralph, the guy who does the evening shift at the concierge desk, and that’s beyond him right now.

Once inside his apartment, he considers his options and decides it’s okay if dinner is a protein shake.

He’d had a meeting with the team nutritionist that afternoon, Kristen, and she’d been mostly enthusiastic about his responses to her battery of questions. She’d obviously looked at his file and spent more time than he’d anticipated asking about how anxiety and stress affected his behavior around food. She’d been professional about it, but the questions had felt intrusive and he’d left feeling paralyzed about making any decisions at all about what to put in his body.

So he falls back on a the safe option and drinks it down standing in the kitchen looking out over the river and enjoying the blessed silence that is having an apartment with a door that shuts and locks.

It’s only barely six, and will still be light outside for several hours. But he can’t think of anything he wants to do, and the large main room of the apartment is making him anxious with its unpacked cardboard boxes and unfamiliar furniture. So he brushes his teeth and changes into a pair of flannel boxers and his favorite hoodie from Samwell, impulsively tucking Monsieur Éléphant into the front pocket, before he retrieves his laptop from his desk and retreats to the bedroom.

He’s relieved to see that Bitty’s online with Skype logged in when he opens his laptop and connects to the building’s WiFi. His phone is still in his messenger bag and now that he’s in bed the thought of getting up again sounds impossible.

“Hey Jack!” Bitty’s face lights up in a smile as the video feed connects and they can see each other. Bitty’s in his bedroom, sitting with his computer in his lap, with a halo of evening sunlight around his head from the window behind his chair.

“Is this still a good time?” Jack asks automatically, even though they had made plans to Skype when he got home via text earlier in the day.

“Oh, I was just scrolling through Twitter and talking to Lardo,” Eric waves away the question. “I knew you were gonna call. How was day two?”

“Exhausting,” Jack says, honestly. “Being on the ice is good, and I think I’m gonna learn a lot, but. But it’s -- right now it’s harder than I thought it was going to be. And then there’s everything that _isn’t_ playing hockey, you know?”

“Not really, I guess,” Eric admits. “Like what?”

“I had to spend three hours this morning with the P.R. team. They’re all … good? At what they do? But I’d forgotten …” he trails off, losing the words. He’s watched his parents work with enough publicists, and worked with a few himself, to know that the Falconers have some excellent people. He trusts them. But a huge proportion of their job is to pick and choose ways of sharing information about the players -- players who now include _Jack_ \-- that Jack doesn’t want to share with anyone whom he doesn’t know personally. They’d walked him patiently through the ins and outs of what type of information they would release about players, been reassuringly firm about the personal details they would _not_ discuss unless he specifically requested they do so -- or did something incredibly stupid.

Jack had felt _included_ as a decision-maker at the table, rather than someone whose life was being talked _about_ , and that had felt good. It had also been utterly draining. He’d left the conference room feeling like he would never be able to dredge up enough syllables to form even the simplest of sentences for the rest of the week.

And yet he had a physical in the morning, after conditioning, and then a money management seminar in the afternoon.

Hockey. He’s here to play hockey. He pulls in a breath and concentrates on the pleasant ache in his muscles from the day’s physical exertions, remembers the keen satisfaction that comes from learning how to play with his new teammates. He’s watched so much tape at this point, since signing, and even been on the ice a few times with the team during contract negotiations, that he feels like he already has a sense of how they work together and where he might fit in as part of that whole. It’s a challenge he feels prepared, and even excited, to take on.

It’s just everything else that he wishes would just … take care of itself so he can play.

“Can we talk about your day instead?” He asks Bitty, curling over on his side to pillow his head on one forearm, and sliding his other hand into the pocket of his hoodie to cuddle Monsieur Éléphant against his belly. “I’m not -- I’ve spent a lot of time today talking about me. I’d like to just -- not. For awhile.”

“Oh, honey,” Bitty presses his fingers to his own lips, then pushes them outward toward the screen. “You look _wiped_. You make yourself comfortable and I’ll share all the gossip, okay?”

“Okay,” Jack smiles, letting his eyes drift shut. “That’d be nice. So what did _you_ do today?”

“Well, Coach wanted to repair the fence in the backyard, where the woodchucks have been burrowing under to get at Mama’s vegetable garden. So I helped him pick up the chicken wire from Home Depot yesterday, and then I got up early this morning so we could dig the trench and bury the fencing before the sun was too high in the sky…” Jack lets Eric’s voice wash over him, the way he used to in the Haus kitchen. Sometimes, when he was ostensibly doing homework and Bitty was baking, He'd catch himself just drifting pleasantly on the soft lilt of Bitty’s accent, always more pronounced when he talked about food -- and, Jack now realizes, when he's particularly happy and unselfconscious. It’s also gotten stronger again now that he’s back in Georgia.

“You said you were talking to Lardo?” Jack murmurs, suddenly remembering he needs to reply to Shitty’s text. He’d asked about driving down from Hyannis to visit, possibly with Lardo. Jack isn’t sure that he’s ready for people from his Samwell life to show up Pawtucket -- it feels, somehow, like having them here would just reinforce the fact that he wasn’t going back to Samwell in the fall. He’s okay with that … mostly. But the Haus has been home for the past four years and he’s not ready to think of it as going on without him.

“Oh, yeah,” Bitty affirms. “She DM’d me to get the recipe for my rhubarb-strawberry tarts? I guess her little sister’s eighth grade graduation is next weekend and Lardo’s mother was looking for a recipe and knew about me -- ‘the recipe guy’ Lardo says she called me!” he laughs.

“That’s what you should call your first book,” Jack smiles without opening his eyes.

“Mmm,” Eric pretends to seriously consider the suggestion, “ _Maybe_. I mean, it kind of makes it sound like I’m one of those reality television chefs who want you to know all about how manly they are? Like, probably the cover photo should be of me in an apron and nothing else, arms crossed--" Jack can hear him make the gesture, "--next to a grill full of red meat.”

“I don’t know about the red meat, but I could endorse the ‘apron and nothing else’?”

“ _Jack_.” Bitty sounds ever-so-slightly scandalized, even though he’s the one who’s conjured up the image. Jack smiles, which he knows Bitty can see through his laptop camera. Like talking in the dark, talking with his eyes closed makes it easier for Jack to flirt deliberately. It also seems to let Bitty be more daring than he is when he knows Jack is looking at him, even if just across the high-speed internet connection.

“So you’re saying, during all those hours we spent in the Haus kitchen, you never once thought about me undressing you up against the counter?”

There’s a pause. Jack flickers open his eyes just long enough to catch Bitty’s considering look, the dart of his tongue as he wets his lips while choosing his response.

“Why, Mr. Zimmermann, are you saying that’s what _you_ were thinking about? And here I thought you had a thesis to write.” he’s trying for a drawl but it comes out slightly breathy instead. Jack’s too tired for his body to do much more than note the response and tuck it away for later, but --

“I _did_ have a thesis to write. No thanks to you and your distracting ass.”

“ _Jack_ ,” again Bitty protests without any real force, the shy delight in his voice outweighing the embarrassment by an impressive margin.

“Well,” Jack says, “it’s a pretty nice ass.”

“Oh, ‘pretty nice.’ Thank you very much.”

“But no, to answer your question, I didn’t actually realize I wanted to undress you. At the time. That only happened later. I -- I wasn’t paying attention. Then. I am now.”

“Oh.” 

" 'Oh' in a good way?" Jack asks, just to be sure.

" 'Oh' in a good way, yeah," Eric affirms, with a catch in his voice that makes Jack wish he could come up with something, anything, to keep it there.

“Sorry,” Jack smiles apologetically, “I’m -- I’m not -- this is probably as suggestive as I can manage tonight. But I just -- wanted you to know. That I think about … stuff like that. Sometimes even when it’s awkward. Like today, when we were running suicide drills, and I suddenly remembered that day? During exam week? When you were baking maple-lemon tarts in those shorts of yours and that red t-shirt that …” he waves pulls his hand out of his hoodie to wave it in a Shitty-like gesture “...clings?”

Bitty laughs, “Oh _Lord_ , Jack, remember what I said about hopeless flirting?”

“Mmm. Is _that_ what it was? ‘Cause I was going to call it something more ‘shamelessly slutty.’ ”

“You know Shitty would get on your case for calling me a slut.”

“Yeah, but you like it.”

Bitty _hmmms_ in a way that is neither approval nor disapproval but manages to convey that at least a part of him likes it, either way.

“Oh, hey,” Jack remembers just as he’s starting to drift again. “It looks like a lot of the guys take some time off around the 4th, to spend time with their families? What if I came down to Madison then?”

“For the 4th of July?” Eric sounds dubious. “There’ll be a big family picnic, and the parade and all?”

Jack feels his pulse jump at the less-than-fully enthusiastic response from Bitty. “Would you rather I didn’t meet your family?”

“No! No, I just -- I know you don’t like people and --”

“I don’t ‘don’t like people’ Bits. I just -- some people want a lot of me. I don’t think your extended family’s going to ask me for autographs. And if they do,” he adds hastily, “that would be okay too -- I mean. I want -- I want to know where you come from, eh? And that means meeting your family.”

“Okay -- maybe? Yes." He hears Eric make the decision. "Yes, the 4th of July. That sounds good. I’ll -- I’ll ask my parents about it tomorrow. Oh! And the holiday will make it easier to explain why you’re visiting.”

Jack notes this and remembers that he and Bitty need to talk about … but he’s too tired to start a conversation about what it might mean for them to be out, together. In Georgia or anywhere else. So he just _mmmms_ his agreement. “I’ll let them know tomorrow I’ll be taking some time off. And this weekend I’ll book a flight.”

“Okay. Hey, you’re falling asleep on me Jack. You should close your laptop and let yourself sleep, sweetheart.”

“Miss you,” Jack murmurs. “Love you.”

“I love you and I miss you too, Jack. Talk to you tomorrow?”

“Talk to you tomorrow,” Jack agrees, and struggles up onto one elbow to end the call and close his laptop. He and Monsieur Éléphant roll over and are asleep before the last of the evening light fades from across the Seekonk River.


	17. Wednesday, 3 June 2015

“Okay, listen up y’all!” Rochelle Evans calls out over the chatter of several dozen camp counselors gathered in what, beginning Saturday, would be Eric’s mess hall. He’s sitting with a knot of several other kitchen veterans from the previous summer filling out all of the usual beginning-of-season paperwork. Liability forms, emergency contact forms, food allergies, inoculation history. All around the room new and returning counselors are hunched over their tables, checking details on their phones, digging in their bags for driver’s licenses to be photocopied and put on file.

“Make sure you provide _two_ emergency contacts,” Rochelle continues when the room’s quieted. “And at least one of those contacts should be within an hour’s drive. _Blue_ forms go to Steve--” she points to the guy to her left who’s got a stack of folders in his arm, “-- and the _yellow_ forms go to Keesha. Steve’s your team leader on the Junior side, Keesha’s in charge of the Senior cabins. For those of you who won’t be in charge of a cabin, you’ll have access to your schedule through the staff portal and I expect you to check it daily at the start of shift as assignments _will_ change.”

When she starts talking about work groups for the first of their three pre-session work days, Eric tunes out since he already knows he’ll be working in the kitchen. The camp is in use during the off-season as a retreat and conference center, but that’s nothing like the volume they do during the summer. He’ll spend the next three days with the kitchen crew scrubbing down every surface, unloading deliveries, and working with the head cook, Ellen, to train the two new hires.

“You have a good year?” Skye asks from across the table where she’s scrolling through her phone while they wait for Rochelle to stop talking. “You’re up in Boston, right?”

“Samwell,” Eric nods. Technically, he’s south of the city but no one outside of Massachusetts seems to care about the distinction. “And yeah, I got to take this great class in food history? It was for upperclassmen only but I bribed my way in with pie.”

“Nice.” Skye nods approvingly. “Your pie _is_ the best.”

“Oh! Are we talking about Eric’s pie? I have _dreamed_ about that pie!” Will lays a hand on his chest like he’s pledging allegiance to pie.

“The professor’s agreed to be my adviser -- I’m gonna major in American Studies.”

“So what’ya do with an American Studies degree?” asks Steph. She’s in Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Eric shrugs. “I don’t know yet. I’m thinking about maybe doing something with my vlog -- recipes and food history combined? Mama and I have talked about a cookbook, someday. Which won’t pay the bills but -- alongside a day job maybe?”

“So like Paula Deen?” Steph asks, and Eric winces.

“Well, without the racism.”

On the table his phone lights up and it’s a call from Jack. “I -- I gotta take this,” he says to the table, generally, and ducks out into the mid-morning sunshine.

“Jack?”

“Bits, hey. Is this a good time?”

“I’m at Oconee today -- but it’s okay, we’re just doing all the preliminary stuff. I got all the orientation stuff last year. And Skye and the others can tell me if I miss anything important.”

“No you should --” Eric can tell Jack’s about to hang up. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you at work.”

“Jack. It’s okay. I can’t talk for long, but -- what did you call me about?” Jack’s been texting him intermittently throughout the day when he’s with the team or between meetings, but he doesn’t usually call without texting first to see if Eric’s available. Eric pulls the phone away from his ear to see if he missed -- but no, his notifications don’t indicate any new texts.

“Sorry I forgot -- Sorry. I knew you were starting camp today. I just --”

“ _Jack_. You’re starting to worry me here. Are you okay? Is everything okay? Did your meeting with --”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s -- it was a good practice this morning. A couple of the guys invited me to get lunch with them in a bit. And then I’m supposed to be meeting with a financial adviser. They make all the rookies do it, I guess.”

Eric’s still not sure how he feels about how rich Jack’s family is -- how rich _Jack_ is -- and this just reminds him that Jack’s making more money than probably anyone in Eric’s family has _ever_ made. “That’s good?” he says, like a question, still not sure why they’re having this conversation.

“That’s not why I called,” Jack says, as if he’s read Eric’s mind. “Shitty texted yesterday and asked about coming down to Pawtucket for a visit. He’s thinking about next weekend. And Lardo might be coming with him.”

Eric waits for the question.

“I thought --” Jack pauses. “I was thinking that, when they’re here, I’d tell them? About us? But I wanted to ask you. How you felt about that.”

This conversation is rapidly going in a direction Eric had not anticipated. He glances over his shoulder through the window in the dining hall, where Rochelle is talking again, waiting another sheet of paper in front of the staff. His absence is probably going to be noticed, but he suddenly doesn’t think he can ask to postpone this discussion until tonight. So he takes a few steps away from the hall and sits down on one of the stone walls that wind through the camp grounds.

“You want to tell Shitty and Lardo?”

“They’re my closest friends, Bits, I --”

“No! I mean, _yes_. I’m not --” he pauses and takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Jack. I guess I just assumed you’d want to keep it quiet. For awhile. For maybe a long while.”

The phone is quiet. Eric hears the faint sound of a siren in the background, growing louder and louder and then fading again as it passes nearby wherever Jack is sitting. It’s muted enough Eric thinks he must be inside. Or maybe in his car?

“I’m sorry, Bitty. I should have -- we should have talked about this sooner.” Jack sighs.

Eric scratches pink circles into the skin on the side of his knee with his thumbnail and tries not to worry about what “this” means.

“Okay,” he says, in a small voice, wishing he could pretend to be someone braver.

“I know you’re not out to your parents. Yet. But I -- I promised myself after Kent and my overdose that I wouldn’t hide things like this, _important_ things, things I care about, from the people who look out for me. Shitty and Lardo are two of those people. And they care about you too -- about both of us.”

“Do they even know you like boys?” Eric asks, because it’s a question he’s wondered about and it’s easier to ask than any of the other questions he has tumbling around in his head right now.

“It’s never come up,” Jack admits.

“You’re telling me you lived with Shitty Knight in the Haus for three years -- that Shitty _cuddled with you in bed_ \--”

“Oh my god you’re never going to let me forget that.”

“-- you're damn right, I’m not -- you _cuddled in bed with Shitty_ and the subject of your sexuality ‘never came up’?”

Jack has the decency to laugh. “Shits is … Shits. We didn’t talk about it. And it … worked.”

Eric decides he’s probably never going to understand how Shitty and Jack are friends. But he’s also strangely comforted by that, but the very inexplicability of their friendship. Because he knows Shitty well enough to know that a) the only person Shitty is interested in getting non-platonically naked with is Lardo, and b) once Shitty knows that he and Jack are together he will respect every motherfucking boundary they care to draw.  
  
“Is it weird for me to say that actually makes sense to me?”

“It makes sense to you because you lived with Shitty last year, too. He makes better sense in close proximity.”

“Or maybe he just starts messing with our heads.”

“Maybe. Bitty. What I’m trying to say is. I should have said this sooner. I should have said it the very first day. I don’t want to lie to people. I _won't_ lie to people. It’s one thing to let people assume, when you’re not in a relationship -- people make assumptions. Unless you say you’re gay people think you’re straight and see what they want to see. I was okay with that, when I wasn’t dating anyone, but. I’m with you now.”

_I’m with you now._

“So ... what are you saying? You want to come out to ... the team? Our team, I mean? To the Falconers? To the press? What’s -- what would that even look like?”

Jack makes a frustrated noise. “Right now I just want to tell Shitty and Lardo. And I’d like to -- not today, but soon maybe -- I’d like to tell George. That I’m gay and that I’m dating you. I think she’s guessed, already, about me. But I want -- when I met with the P.R. team yesterday they were clear that they won’t answer questions from the press about rumors concerning players’ sexual activities or relationships without express permission. So you and I get to decide when and how we do this. I want to tell George because -- maybe she’ll be able to help us figure out what we want to do.” Eric hears the frustration in Jack’s voice again, can picture the hunch of his shoulders and the tension in his jaw.

“The guys are gonna start asking questions and I don’t want to have to -- I’m not doing that to myself again. I’m not going to lie to them, Bits. But I can also just ... not talk about it. I have a lot of practice doing that. So if you’re not ready -- it’s a lot to ask.”

“It’s --” Eric’s chest feels tight with this boy of his. How did he ever, ever begin to deserve Jack? He blinks up into the hazy sky trying to put words to what he’s feeling.

“I -- yes.” He takes a deep breath. “Please. _Please_ yes. Tell Shitty and Lardo. I want -- I want people to know. It makes it more _real_ somehow. Not that it isn’t -- not that I don’t believe you’re --”

“I know,” Jack says. “Me too.”

“And I’m -- I’m trying to think about how to tell my parents. I want to tell them before we tell anyone else, I think. I mean, you can tell George. She asked me about you, did I ever tell you? When she came to visit Samwell. She caught me in the hall at Faber and said she’d heard I was out and wondered what it was like, being out in the NCAA, what sort of support I had from my team. She’s good people.”

“Yeah.” Jack agrees. “Yeah, she is. I can’t … I can’t think about talking to her this week. But maybe before I come to visit?”

“She won’t tell anyone else, unless we say it’s okay?”

“I won’t tell her if she can’t promise,” Jack promises him.

People are starting to emerge from the mess and head off in groups. “I gotta go, Jack. I have a kitchen to clean and organize before Saturday,” Eric says, reluctantly.

“Go on,” Jack says, and Eric can hear the smile in his voice. “You know they won’t get it right without you.”

“ ‘Course they won’t,” Eric smiles. “Jack?”

Jack makes a querying noise.

“I want you to know that I never, _ever_ want you to lie about us” Eric says, his voice shaking. “I’m never gonna ask you to do that, you hear me? I just wanted you to know that.”

“Yeah, me too,” Jack says softly back. “I mean. I wanted you to know that too.”

They sit on the phone in silence for another handful of seconds. It never feels like enough, talking like this. Eric feels a fierce ache in his chest that’s the pain of distance. He needs to cling to Jack right now and Jack is heartbreakingly far away. It’s just so _unfair_.

“I really gotta go,” he says, finally, when he sees Skye step out into the sunlight and look around, clearly scouting for him. “Skype later? Señor Bun and I can tell you a bedtime story.”

“That’d be nice.”

“I love you and I miss you,” Eric whispers.

“I love you and I miss you,” Jack says back. “Now go clean that stove.”


	18. Thursday, 4 June 2015

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A note about June 6-18:** Starting Monday, I have about ten days of pretty intensely-scheduled work and family life. We have out-of-town visitors coming, will be traveling, and I have some evening responsibilities at work. So the long and short of it is that I'm losing my three hours of writing time most evenings. My plan is to post super-short installments during that time (by "super short" I mean ~500 instead of ~1,500 words) so I can write them on my lunch hour. WE WILL SEE if this plan works. Look for lots of texting between various constellations of our sprawling cast. I really don't want to give up these daily updates because they're so much fun. So I will do my best!  <3

Jack wakes up from a nap on Thursday afternoon and blinks, disoriented, at the alarm clock on his bedside table -- the light in the room causing him momentary panic that he’s somehow overslept and will be late for Friday morning practice.

It’s 6:23pm and he’s been asleep for a little over three hours.

He groans and rolls over. He’d come back to his apartment after lunch with Mr. Ames and the suits from TD Bank, Google, and IcelandAir because he didn’t have any other obligations that day and could feel himself running on empty. Apparently, more so than he’d even realized.

He wipes his hands across his face. The lunch had gone better than it could have. Ames -- he’d asked Jack to call him Frank -- was maybe a decade older than Bob and had obviously done his homework on Jack’s career both in the Q and also at Samwell. Jack hadn’t expected otherwise, but it was still reassuring to know that the Falconers were owned by someone who genuinely cared about the game itself and not just the prestige of owning a team. Ames had played himself, it turned out, at Exeter and then his first two years at Yale before a knee injury had ended his career as a student athlete. He was disappointed neither his son or daughter turned out to be interested in sports, and Jack got the impression that in buying the Falconers Ames rather fancied himself as having adopted an entire team’s worth of sons who share his obsession.

The conversation had faltered, though, after it became apparent that only one of the three executives -- the regional loan officer from TD Bank who, it turned out, was from Ontario -- knew enough about hockey to join in the discussion. At that point, Ames had switched gears -- Jack suspected he’d been prepped by his assistant beforehand, because he knows the names of their wives, knows where their children attend school, where they spent their last vacation -- and Jack realized that his role in the conversation was functionally over.

It’s another, not entirely comfortable, reminder that he’s gone from being a _student_ athlete -- whose life is at least somewhat defined by his historical scholarship, his tenancy in the Haus, his keen eye for portraiture -- to being simply _an athlete_. He hadn’t exactly been looking forward to answering questions about his unusual path to the NHL -- but it also feels dismissive to have these men in their tailored suits talking about their own children’s budding careers in finance or medicine, or their latest vacation on Nevis, with a clear expectation that as a young, unmarried hockey player Jack has no other interests.

He knows some players manage to shift their public persona through charity work, family life, through lending their names to projects they support. A couple of the guys on the Falconers’ team, he's aware thanks to Bitty, have a pretty active Twitter presence and talk about stuff like the family kittens or their kid’s preschool recital. But Jack knows that can be a double-edged sword -- letting the public into your private life. Or what they imagine to be your private life. He’s not ready to go there yet. If ever.

So he’d let the lunch conversation eddy around him and finished his salad and grilled chicken in silence. When the meal wrapped up and Ames signed off on the bill they all stood up, shook hands, and said their polite good-byes. Jack had slid gratefully behind the wheel of his Honda and headed back to Pawtucket.

He gets up to pee and wash the sleep out of his eyes. His phone is still sitting on the kitchen island where he dropped it with his keys after lunch. The message light is blinking so he wakes up the screen and thumbs through his alerts -- an email from his mother, another one from Yannick, a text from Shitty confirming that he and Lardo are going to visit the following weekend. There are a string of short updates from Bitty, who’s been at Camp Oconee since eight that morning.

Reading from the bottom up, it looks like he’s gone to … play pool? … with a couple of co-workers. Skye and Will. Jack tries to remember if he knows anything about them -- Eric had been a torrent of names and anecdotes the night before. Skye was the one who swam for UGA? And he thought Will was the kid Bitty said had spent the year before doing something for AmeriCorps in Tennessee.

Jack’s first impulse is to text Bitty to make sure they have a designated driver. But he thinks maybe that sounds too much like he’s still Bittle’s team captain. And he’s only ever seen Bitty get really drunk when he’s within walking distance of the Haus, so …

… he digs the book he’s been reading out of his bag and goes back into the bedroom with the book and the phone.

He props himself up on his and Bitty’s pillows against the headboard and texts in answer to Bitty’s earlier questions:

 _Lunch was fine._  
_Why do people always think all hockey players can talk about is hockey?_  
_I just woke up from a nap. Skype later?_  
_Have fun playing pool._

He’s reading _Consider the Fork_ because he’d heard an interview with the author on NPR. He'd ordered the title for Bitty, then gotten interested paging through the book and decided to read it himself first. But it’s not holding his attention tonight.

He’s still loose-limbed from his nap but slightly restless from sleeping too long. And his mind keeps turning over the idea of Bits in a dimly-lit bar wielding a pool cue with the same assurance he wields his stick on the ice. He imagines Bitty in his tight-fitting jeans and one of his distressed concert tees leaning in to line up a shot …

Jack sets his book aside on the bedside table and slides down his pillows into a more comfortable position.

He folds his hands across his chest, fingertips touching, and breathes. He feels the rise and fall of his chest as the air moves in and out of his lungs.

It’s so blessedly _quiet_ here. His bedroom looks out over the river so the building insulates him from the traffic of the street and the parking lot. There’s a violinist in the apartment above him who practices occasionally, and the ambient sounds of tenants moving through the corridors, dogs taken out to be walked, the flush of water down the pipes. But it’s all much less raucous than living in a house full of college boys, surrounded by a campus full of eighteen-to-twenty-two year olds. Jack had grown up an only child, traveling a lot with his parents, used to long uninterrupted stretches of time with his mom reading or working through grant applications or answering emails while nearby he'd played solitary games or drawn or read in contented solitude. He’d mostly loved his teammates, living in the Haus, but on some level he’d always felt braced for someone (likely Shitty) to come bursting into his room.

Not that Shitty would have been fazed by the sight of Jack jerking off.

But Jack doesn’t need performance anxiety in _this_ part of his life.

He brushes his left hand lightly across his chest, feeling his thumb catch on his nipple beneath the thin cotton of his white undershirt. He feels the warmth of his hands seeping through the cloth, rubs a little harder with the edge of his thumbnail and feels how his body begins to respond.

He takes another deep breath and thinks deliberately about Bitty, about the grace with which Bitty moves on the ice and in the kitchen, about the way his expressions are whole-body affairs full of light and energy when he’s happy and dampening an entire room when he’s hurting. He thinks about all of those hours he and Bits have spent on the ice together, in the kitchen together, dozing together on the bus during roadies.

He suddenly remembers one night, on their way back from a game in upstate New York last January, when Bitty had fallen asleep against Jack’s arm and in his sleep (at least, Jack had thought at the time it was in sleep -- now Jack wasn’t so sure) had pressed his hand up against Jack’s belly, fingers curling at the gap where Jack’s shirt had been rucked up by the seatbelt. Jack remembers the warm, reassuring weight of Bitty asleep against him, and how carefully still Jack had sat so as not to wake him. He remembers how Bitty’s fingers had tickled, slightly, but in a way that left him conscious of how much he likes the feel of another person’s skin sliding against his own, how he’s never had the chance to see if he can get his fill of that sensation -- his experiences always too fleeting, over too soon, with too much haste.

Here in his own bed in Pawtucket, Jack doesn’t have to hurry so he lets himself linger. He plays his hand across his chest feeling his nipples tighten, feeling the rest of his body wake up in response. He shifts his hips, just a bit, flexes his quads so his hips rise and the fabric of his boxers pulls lightly against his penis.

He pushes his hands lower, in a sweeping downward motion, then up again under his t-shirt. Skin to skin.

It’s his own hands, which lack the breathtaking novelty of someone else invited to touch, someone else reaching out for him. Jack can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times Kent actually reached for him with open desire -- desire not clouded by alcohol or complicated motives that it had taken Jack years to recognize. And yet more years to understand with something approximating empathy. As long as Parse kept his distance.

He’d managed to ignore how much he missed Kent’s touch for years -- first because _nothing_ had felt like much of anything, good or bad, and then because memories of Kent touching him had begun to feel like a violation. The things he’d done with Kent -- always blurred by alcohol, half-acknowledged, sometimes outright denied -- had made even _desiring_ sex feel dangerous for a year or two.

But he’s been slowly, slowly coming back to desire -- first the desire to touch himself in ways that are more than perfunctory. To really _pay attention_ to what he’s doing and why it feels good, the way he pays attention to his body on the ice: the stretch and burn of muscle and the ups and downs of heart rate, the inhale and exhale of oxygen passing through his lungs, the ringing in his ears when his body reaches and finds that sweet spot he’s aiming for.

Then, when Bitty had reached for Jack, pulling him back for _another_ kiss, in the Haus back in May, Jack had felt something in his gut fall into place.

 _This_ is what he’s been missing.

He arches up into his own hands, pressing his palms flat and hard against his chest as he pushes against them, elbows digging into the mattress, hips twisting, fabric dragging against rapidly-sensitizing skin. He drags his hands down his torso and pushes his fingers beneath the elastic of his waistband, lets his thumbs hook over the fabric so he can shove the cloth down toward his knees.

He leaves the boxers mid-thigh, liking the way the elastic pulls tight across muscle. He can imagine how Bitty would feel, straddling him there, the warm back of his thighs and the crease of his ass close against Jack’s legs. He imagines Bitty’s thigh muscles tightening under Jack’s own hands as Bitty lifts himself up to lean forward and down, kneeling above Jack to press kisses to the hollow of Jack’s neck, maybe nipping at Jack’s earlobe.

He finally drags his own hands up between his thighs and palms himself, letting his hips do the work stuttering up into his loose fist. He stretches his neck and turns to press his face into the soft, heavy weight of the eiderdown pillows. He screws his eyes shut and rocks into his hand, thinking about how Bitty will feel warm and alive curled over him, his hand or Jack’s between them, stroking together, hips moving in point, counterpoint, together, apart, then together, together, together in slow, lazy, fast, lazy, never-ending circles of sweat and slick and --

\-- Jack comes as silently as he always does, forgetting to breathe for a moment or two as he holds onto the sensation of pure, uncomplicated, unthinking physical pleasure as long as he possibly can before slowly releasing his body (feet, ankles, calves, knees, thighs, abdomen, wrists, forearms, elbows, shoulders, neck, chest, belly, groin) back to the mattress.

He sucks in a deep breath, lets it out, then takes another one, listening to his pulse slow as the orgasm dissipates into the slow molasses warmth of _after_.

The bed feels achingly lonely, now. The peace and quiet less peaceful than it had felt half an hour ago and more … empty. He imagines Bitty sliding down onto the bed beside him to fill that empty space and discovers that he fits just fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I picked the Falconers’ corporate sponsors based on geography (TD Bank), [LGBT-friendly reputation](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/10/yougov-lgbt-brands-ranking-_n_7554552.html%20) (Google), and diversity of company type (IcelandAir). All three are companies I regularly see advertising in Boston, and TD is a sponsor of the Boston Bruins. So some creative license there.
> 
> [Nevis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Caribbean_islands) is a Caribbean island and I didn't _know_ people who talked casually about holidaying in the Caribbean until I moved to Boston. Boston society folks are whoa. 
> 
> [_Consider the Fork_](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13587130-consider-the-fork) by Bee Wilson. 
> 
> The Bitty-asleep-on-the-team-bus incident comes from [this Twitfic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6353677/chapters/15620233).


	19. Friday, 5 June 2015

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is gifted to Burning_Up_A_Sun and Crowgirl because without them, I never would have figured out where the problem in Eric's isolation lay and how to fix it. #BestInternetWifingIsBest (#BestActualWifingToo).

Eric is having a _shit_ day.

He woke up at five after roughly six hours of restless, nightmare-filled sleep feeling like he hasn’t slept at all. The temperature’s forecast to climb into the nineties and he’s got a longer “to-do” list at work than he’d like to considering the kids are arriving starting at ten the following morning.

Jack had been asleep when Eric got home from Dave’s, the dive bar where he’d gone with Skye and Will to play pool. Skye’s the only one of the three of them who’s technically old enough to order alcohol but the staff at Dave’s never give a shit who’s drinking once you’ve ordered. Eric had only had half of Skye’s second beer, but it had given him a headache anyway and he’d gotten home tired and frustrated and sad with his parents already in bed and Jack asleep in his hipster loft apartment. He’d lain awake staring at the shadowed cracks in his ceiling and felt muddled thoughts chase fruitlessly around his tired brain.

He’s angry at Jack. Has been, since the phone call on Wednesday. And he feels terrible about it, because he knows he should be happy, right? He should be _thrilled_. He’d assumed -- once they’d established that The Kiss had, in fact, actually happened and that they both, in fact, wanted to do _more kissing_ sooner rather than later -- that Jack would want to keep everything quiet for at least a little while. Maybe a year. Maybe more. He’s scared to even imagine them staying together that long, for fear of jinxing it, but -- To the extent he’d had a chance to imagine what a future with Jack would be like he’s imagined _privacy_. And maybe eventual, careful disclosure.

What he and Jack have together still feels f _ragile_ and Eric’s not stupid. Maybe his middle school tormentors had been suspended but he’d bet good money that today those guys are the ones who yell _fucking faggots!_ from the stands, leave bigoted comments on YouTube clips of presser footage, and Tweet rape threats at female hockey fans and writers from accounts that also proudly sport photos from their latest networking event. Guys like that, they _know_ there will be no serious consequences.

So _oh my god_ Eric does not want Jack facing any of that -- even though he knows Jack has probably been the subject of all that and worse already. He also doesn’t feel at all prepared to cope with being _Jack Zimmermann’s Boyfriend!!_

He just wants … _Jack_ for a while. Wants to be Jack-and-Bitty and do stupid Jack-and-Bitty things like watch a whole season of something on Netflix while cuddling on the couch and find all the cool brunch places in Pawtucket and maybe play hookey from classes and take a long weekend to go leaf peeping in Vermont. Eric’s never been leaf-peeping in Vermont.

But suddenly it feels like he can’t have that first, because Jack’s talking about telling George and even if, rationally, Eric knows that Jack means it about not coming out until Eric’s ready it also feels like he can’t really say no. Because he’s not going to ask Jack to stay in the closet, not after what happened with Kent, and even without Kent he’s clear in his own mind that it’s never okay to ask someone to hide who they are that way.

And Eric _doesn’t_ want to stay closeted. That's not what he wants at all. Hell, he applied to Samwell and two other schools out of state -- even if his parents made him apply to UGA as a safety school -- specifically so that he could find a way to come out. And he has … at Samwell.

Being out at Samwell had been so easy this year, in fact, that the exhaustion of being closeted in Madison had faded from memory. When Jack kissed him at the Haus on graduation day, it hadn’t even hit Eric until he was somewhere over Pennsylvania that he was going back to a world where he had no one to share his news with.

He’s dragging stock pots out of the corner cupboard in the camp kitchen when he realizes that he’s angry at Jack because he’s sweet baby Jesus _jealous_ of Jack. Jack, who’s been able to tell his parents and share his news with his gay-married uncles. Jack, who gets to hang out with Shitty and Lardo and tell _them_ a week from now. Jack, who works somewhere that doesn’t hold coffee-break Bible study (optional) and reserve a few moments for silent prayer at the start of every meal.

He slams a stock pot a little too forcefully onto the linoleum-covered concrete of the kitchen floor and hears Steph behind him say, “ _Jesus_ , Eric!” under her breath.

“Sorry -- sorry.” He mutters.

He feels trapped, is how he feels. And a part of him wishes Jack were trapped right there with him instead of calling him up in the middle of his workday, his voice steady and certain and so _grown up_ , making terrifying promises to Eric while all Eric can feel is rising panic that if Jack tells one more person that Eric is Jack’s boyfriend then he’s going to wake up the next morning to headlines scrolling across the morning news at the gas station _… NHL ROOKIE JACK ZIMMERMANN GAY!! DATING COLLEGE JUNIOR ERIC “BITTY” BITTLE OF MADISON, GEORGIA!!..._

(By Friday morning he’d had that nightmare already, two nights running.)

So he’s angry. And he’s jealous. And scared. And _exhausted_. And of course he can’t tell Jack any of this because Jack is trying _so hard_  and _so earnestly_ to be a good boyfriend -- as good a boyfriend as he can be from up in Rhode Island. Eric knows Jack wants him to be excited to tell Shitty and Lardo they’re dating, and he knows that Jack meant the promise never to lie about their relationship as a _promise_ not a threat.

Which is why he’s now feeling miserable about wishing he could take back the permission he gave Jack to tell Shitty, and Lardo, and especially George. He wants to rewind the tape to Wednesday morning and find words to say _Please, can we wait_ and _Jack, we’ve only kissed once … could we maybe wait until you’ve come down to see me before telling anyone else?_

It feels ungrateful. And cowardly. And _wrong_. Everything feels _wrong_. His skin feels wrong. His hair hurts. His eyes are gritty like he’s developing an allergic reaction to the entire state of Georgia and his life sucks and he doesn’t want it to suck, it’s not supposed to suck, damn it, because this past year at the Haus was amazingly wonderful and he’s got plans for his vlog and for his junior year, and he’s looking forward to playing hockey with Ransom and Holster and Chowder and Nursey and Dex, and living with Lardo, and seeing Jack … seeing lots and lots of Jack …

But right now, everything feels really shitty.

Which is why he’s up at 11pm baking a tart.

The fourth tart.

Because the first three didn’t turn out the way he wanted them to and if he doesn’t get the fourth one right he’s going to _murder_ \--

“So kiddo,” his mother says, appearing suddenly at his side, leaning back against the kitchen counter so she can look at him sideways, her arms crossed. “You gonna tell me what’s up?”

“This apricot tartine isn’t working, Mama, and I don’t know what --”

“Dickey.”

Eric sighs and wipes the sweat of his forehead with the back of his wrist.

“The tartine _isn’t_ working.”

“Mmm-hm. Be that as it may, it’s after eleven on a Friday night and you’ve been in the kitchen baking since we finished supper five hours ago. Your father and I are about to head to bed and my mother’s intuition tells me that there’s something keeping you up that’ll keep keeping you up if you don’t spill.”

Eric stares down at half-filled tart pan under his hands, the little half-moons of ripe, sugared apricot lined up in concentric circles from center out towards the crimped edge.

“I just --” he stops and tries again for something a little closer to the truth.

“I just miss everyone,” he says, truthfully. “I don’t feel like I _fit_ here, anymore. My skin feels all tight and itchy, and I keep looking around for the guys on the team even though I _know_ none of ‘em is closer than Wilmington. And then I hate myself for hating it here because it’s not you and Coach that I --” he trails off.

It is hard being here with them right now. But not because he doesn’t love them, or enjoy spending time with them.

“Mmm.” Suzanne says thoughtfully, unfolding her arms and going over to the table to inspect the rejected tartine lined up on cooling racks where Eric can glare at them. “May I try--?” She gestures to the first attempt and when Eric nods goes to get a fork from the silverware drawer.

“Sweetpea, I think that’s just part of growing up and finding your own place in the world,” she says. “Oh, I think this one has just a bit too much … did you use the wildflower honey?” She holds out a forkful for him to taste.

“Sometimes you have to go away for while before you can come home again and … hold on to who you’ve become in the meantime,” she says while he chews. “It takes practice. I remember the summer I moved back in with MooMaw and Pop-Pop after graduation, when I was looking for a teaching job -- _Lord!_  The fights we used to have. Pop-Pop never did stop insisting that as long as I lived under his roof I’d respect a 10pm curfew!” She laughs. “Your poor father had to sneak into my room through the window after they’d gone to bed.”

Eric sighs. “Yeah … I guess.” It’s so much more complicated than that, though.

“I used to say to your daddy, ‘Rich, remember this when we have kids of our own -- they’re gonna find a way to do what they want to, whether we let them or not! Laying down the law isn’t going to help in the slightest” She takes a bite of the second delinquent tart. “Mm -- lemon? Maybe if you cut it with some brown sugar?”

“That’s what I tried with the third one,” Eric gestures, distracted. He’s thinks about his mother and father sneaking around behind his grandparents’ back the summer they were dating. His grandparents had rules about unmarried cohabitation and they couldn’t afford their own place until both of them found work. He’s heard the story so many times before -- the weekend drives they’d take up into the Blue Ridge Mountains to go camping, cold nights spent with their sleeping bags zipped together, so they could enjoy what his mother liked to call “a kiss and a cuddle” away from the watchful eyes of her parents.

It was on a camping trip just like that, a few years later, that Eric himself had been conceived.

“At least Jack is coming down for the 4th of July.” Suzanne is saying. “You’ll get a chance to show him how the American South goes all out on Independence Day! What a sweet boy, taking time out from his training to come down and visit. --Oh, honey, I think this one is _much_ better. You’ve got the balance of citrus and sweet just right to bring out the flavor of the apricots. What didn’t you like about this one?”

“Jack-and-I-are-dating, Mama,” Eric hears himself blurt out, in a rush, hands shaking so much he has to flatten them against the kitchen counter, apricot juice and all, to steady himself. “Jack -- he’s my -- he’s my boyfriend.”

Then, to his own eternal mortification, he says distinctly, “Oh, _fuck it_ ,” and bursts into tears just as Coach walks into the kitchen.

There’s a horrible moment when all Eric can hear over the sound of his own slightly-hysterical sobs is utter silence of his parents’ shock. He’s always hated being a crier, the tears just welling up whenever the emotions get too overwhelming to hold inside, and the kids who taunted him at school exploited that mercilessly. He hates more than anything to cry in front of other people, his parents included. He can’t even really parse out what he’s crying about right now -- is he relieved that it’s finally done? Scared about what his parents might say? Irrationally angry at Jack like somehow it’s Jack’s fault Eric had to do this alone? Once he starts crying he can’t stop because it’s all of those things and none of them all tangled up together and his body refuses to cooperate with his angry internal self-instruction to _fucking pull yourself together and --_

“Baby, baby, oh, _oh_ ,” Suzanne’s there at his side, now, pulling him away from the counter and folding him in an enveloping hug that only makes him cry harder, in against her shoulder, as the tension he’s been carrying with him for the past three days tumbles out in a torrent of tears. “Dickey, honey, what _is_ it? Why all these tears? Sweetheart -- you weren’t worried about telling us were you?”

With his face still buried in his mother’s shoulder, all Eric can do is nod damply into her smock.

“Oh, darling,” Suzanne rocks him like he’s a fussy toddler. “Sweetheart, I’m so sorry. Honey, you must know we already knew?”

“Already knew?” Eric asks, thickly, groping for one of the kitchen chairs and dropping into the seat, wiping his face on the hem of his floury t-shirt.

Coach, who hasn’t said a word, reaches for the box of tissues by the phone and hands them to Suzanne who hands them to Eric.

Eric blows his nose.

“That you liked boys?” Suzanne’s voice is worried, now. “I mean, we weren’t sure -- your daddy reminded me more than once it’s not my place to slap a label on anyone without their permission, and there’s nothing that says a child who knows his way around the kitchen and has a taste for flowery curtains is going to grow up to be gay. We didn’t want to --”

Eric is pretty sure he’s lost the plot of this conversation entirely.

“Wait -- _what_? You -- you thought I was gay but --”

“I’m sorry, son,” Coach says, sitting down in the chair next to Eric, elbows on his knees, fiddling with his wedding ring like he does when things get serious. “Maybe we should have said something, your mama and me. But we didn’t want you to think --”

Eric’s brain is doing a rapid recapitulation of his childhood memories, sorting through every available shred of evidence that his parents -- he’d known they disapproved of the pastors at church who condemned homosexuality, he’d known they’d voted the Democratic ticket in every election he could remember, supported the campaign against Amendment 1 in 2004 -- but he’d known other people who talked gay rights in the abstract but still reacted badly when confronted by the reality when someone in their own family or circle of friends came out. He’s always assumed that part of the awkwardness he and Coach have lived with since Eric’s middle school years has to do with Coach’s fear that Eric is gay.

“I --” he starts, and then stops because he mind is absolutely blank.

Suzanne and Coach exchange a look, and Coach clears his throat. “You should know,” he says, haltingly, “you should know that I understand a bit about liking men, myself.”

Suzanne squeezes Eric’s shoulder. “I met your father when he was with my boyfriend’s roommate Alex,” she says. “It was the early nineties, you understand, and to most people homosexuality was all about AIDS and bisexuality didn’t even exist.”

Eric carefully pulls another tissue out of the box, folds it neatly into quarters, and blows his nose a second time. He notes that his hands have stopped shaking and he actually feels perfectly calm. Beyond calm. He’s possibly the calmest he’s ever been in his _life_ because he cannot even _begin_ to understand what is happening here.

“So, wait --” he finally says. “You’re telling me that _somehow you just forgot to mention that you’re bisexual_. To a son you thought was probably gay.”

“Or bisexual,” Suzanne adds.

“Oh. My. _God_.” is all Eric can say, staring at his father.

“We couldn’t tell you when you were younger,” Coach says. “I mean -- I was, I _am_ , with your mother. That’s what you needed to know, as a child. And I work with kids. I would have lost my job if the school board had found out that I --”

“I--” Eric says again. “I can’t even --” Part of him is _furious_ that his parents somehow didn’t think this was _relevant_ to him. How _dare_ they assume he would just _know_ that they -- what do they think he is, fucking _psychic_?

But the tide of relief that he feels over having _said it_ , finally, and to have the world not come crashing down but somehow stabilize under his feet just --

They have so much to talk about, but right now he needs to -- “I think -- I think I’d like to go call Jack?” he says. “Is that alright? And then maybe … maybe we could do waffles in the morning?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy moley, y'all, I think the jury's out as to whether me or Bitty is more grateful to have this conversation be history! Now we can get on with healing Jack and Eric's miscommunication issues and building them a solid foundation for the future. 
> 
> *prostrates self before fic gods in hopes that Monday has enough coffee*
> 
> [Amendment 1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_Georgia_\(U.S._state\)) was Georgia's mini-DOMA, enacted in 2004. Georgia did not have marriage equality until (*kof*) 26 June 2015 when the _Obergefell_ decision came down. I was originally going to have Eric blurt out his Jack-and-I-are-dating news when the decision came down, but he decided to ignore my plans. Smart kid. Now he and his parents can open a bottle of wine and celebrate with pie.


	20. Saturday, 6 June 2015

A conversation in Twitter DM between:

 **@larrisart**  
Painting. Hockey. Stony more than Stucky. Trash Black Widow and I will end you.

 **@omgcheckplease**  
Baker, former figure skater, and the shortest member of the Samwell hockey team!

* * *

**@larrisart**  
Bits! Mom says thanks for the recipe  
Turns out my relatives inhale food EVEN FASTER than hockey players o_O

Kid sister all graduated now

 **@omgcheckplease**  
<3_<3  
So glad she liked it!!  
It’s one of my favorites  
Tell her I tried it with a hint of cardamom last week -- AMAZING

Hey Lardo?

 **@larrisart**  
?

 **@omgcheckplease**  
Jack says you and Shitty are visiting?

 **@larrisart**  
You’ve talked to Jack?

Yeah! We’re crashing at his place next Saturday  
Think he even has a couch yet?

 **@omgcheckplease**  
*blush*  
Uh … yeah  
We’ve been talking … a lot

He has a couch  
I told him he needs to buy an inflatable mattress and some sheets though

 **@larrisart**  
Dude  
Back up to the part where you told me:  
“We’ve been talking … a lot”  
Bro, you’ve been SILENT on the team chat  
So what’s the deal

 **@omgcheckplease**  
*blush*

 **@larrisart**  
Shitty and I have been worried

DUDE  
YOU DID NOT

 **@omgcheckplease**  
So … um.

 **@larrisart**  
OH MY GOD YOU DID

 **@omgcheckplease**  
WE DID :-D

 **@larrisart**  
Oh thank fuck  
We thought it was never going to end, dude  
Holy shit

So what … you and Zimmermann are an item now?

 **@omgcheckplease**  
Wait … we?

I mean, yes. Jack and I. We’re together  
And I told my parents! And no one died!

Actually: there’s a story I have to tell you but I gotta go in a minute or I’ll be late for work  
(camp starts today)

 **@larrisart**  
“We” = EVERYONE ELSE IN THE HAUS BRO

I think Ransom and Holster have some sort of complicated bet between them over how long it would take you two to get beyond MASSIVE FLIRTING  
Winner gets some sort of sexual favor  
(I did not ask. No deets. Did not want deets.)

(\o/ Hooray for telling your parents, Bits! Congratulations!)

 **@omgcheckplease**  
I’m just going to die when the rest of the team finds out aren’t I?  
I AM GOING TO DIE FROM CHIRPING

Jack is going to owe me  
(Maybe I’ll ask Ransom and Holster what favors I should extract from him)  
(Wait. Ransom and Holster are together???)  
(Since when???)

 **@larrisart**  
Fuck. I can hear my boss’s meeting ending  
Can I tell Shitty?

 **@omgcheckplease**  
Okay. I gotta go anyway

Jack’s telling Shitty right now.

 **@larrisart**  
Haha. Nevermind. Shits just texted me.  
:-D

So happy for you dude.  
*virtual hugs*

 **@omgcheckplease**  
*virtual hugs*


	21. Sunday, 7 June 2015

**To:** Alicia A. Zimmermann <alicia@zimmermann.org>  
**From:** Jack L. Zimmermann <jack@zimmermann.org>  
**Sent:** Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 9:20 AM  
**Subject:** RE: we’re home safe!

Hi Mom,

Hope you and Papa are having a good weekend. The photographs from Vermont were beautiful. Bitty and I were just talking about taking a trip to Burlington this fall -- was the B & B nice?

Sorry I haven’t called this week. I know you worry. Everything is okay but it’s been a lot of new people and they kept me pretty busy my first week. Yesterday I helped some of the guys on the team with an open skate at the arena for kids from the local youth hockey association - my coaching skills are rusty but I think they had a good time! Most of them were more excited about Jersey and Pogs (the other players) than they were about me. Kind of nice.

I wanted to tell you Eric came out to his parents on Friday night. He’s okay, and his parents aren’t mad about him or about us. There are parts of the story I can’t tell you but … you and Papa talk to Suzanne and Coach so maybe you already know some of it. Eric was really scared and I wanted to be there with him but I think it just sort of happened. It was hard to hear the tears in his voice on the other end of the phone and not be able touch him.

How have you and Papa done it for so many years?

Bitty doesn’t want me to to tell George or anyone else on the Falconers yet. I asked him and first he said yes and then yesterday he said no. I understand why he’s scared but thinking about avoiding the subject when it comes up (people talk about their partners and kids) makes me anxious. I don’t know what to say to him.

Je t'aime,  
Jack

* * *

**To:** Jack L. Zimmermann  <jack@zimmermann.org>  
**From:** Alicia A. Zimmermann <alicia@zimmermann.org>  
**Sent:** Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 9:41 AM  
**Subject:** RE: we’re home safe!

Papa and I are so glad to hear that Eric spoke to his parents! Hugs to you both. How brave of Eric, to tell his parents even when he was scared. It sounds like they have some things to work out as a family but, like the three of us learned, being able to talk openly together is often the first and most important step.

Can you talk to George without telling her about Eric? She can know you’re gay, honey, without knowing you’re dating someone - or who that someone is. Would that help you feel better?

Je t’aime aussi,  
Mom

Sent from my iPhone

* * *

**To:** Bill Martel-Amory  <william.amory@wentworth.edu>; Yannick Martel-Amory <yannickma@gmail.com>  
**From:** Jack L. Zimmermann  <jack@zimmermann.org>  
**Sent:** Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 12:01 PM  
**Subject:** RE: hello from the Cape

Dear Uncle Yannick and Uncle Billy,

Angus and Fergus look like they’re enjoying the summer so far! Do they hang out at the theatre with you, Uncle Yannick? There’s a guy on the Falconers, Pogs, who brings his chocolate lab with him to practice and she hangs out with the coaches or naps in the locker room. Her name is Bean (short for Coffee Bean).

I have some things I’d like to talk with you about … I think before the fall. Would there be a good weekend for me to drive out to the Cape and see you? I’ve been talking with Eric about being out and … you said you’d like to help. And I’m trying to be better about asking when I need it.

Eric came out to his parents this week, though! He seems really relieved. I guess they were surprised he thought it was a secret. I’m going to visit him on the 4th of July and he says his parents are looking forward to seeing me (I’ve met Suzanne but not Coach yet).

Jack

* * *

**To:** Eric R. Bittle  <ebittle17@samwell.edu>  
**From:** Jack L. Zimmermann  <jack@zimmermann.org>  
**Sent:** Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 3:13 PM  
**Subject:** FW: Confirmation of Itinerary FT035Y061Z

Hi Bitty,

Here is my itinerary for the flight to Atlanta. I hope you can meet me at the airport (because then I get to see you sooner!) but let me know if I should get a rental car. Maybe it would be better for me to have a vehicle?

I love you and I miss you,  
Jack

* * *

**To:**  Jack L. Zimmermann <jack@zimmermann.org>  
**From:** Eric R. Bittle  <ebittle17@samwell.edu>   
**Sent:** Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 3:21 PM  
**Subject:** FW: Confirmation of Itinerary FT035Y061Z

Of course I’ll pick you up at the airport! Don’t be silly.

I’ll call when I get home tonight,

and 

Bits

(That’s “I love you and I miss you” in emoji)

Sent from my Pie Safe.

* * *

**To:** Eric R. Bittle  <ebittle17@samwell.edu>  
**From:** Jack L. Zimmermann  <jack@zimmermann.org>  
**Sent:** Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 3:28 PM  
**Subject:** FW: Confirmation of Itinerary FT035Y061Z

I do know enough Bitty to translate that.

Jack

* * *

**To:** Jack L. Zimmermann  <jack@zimmermann.org>  
**From:** Eric R. Bittle  <ebittle17@samwell.edu>  
**Sent:** Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 3:31 PM  
**Subject:** FW: Confirmation of Itinerary FT035Y061Z

And I know enough Jack to translate THAT.

Sent from my Pie Safe.


	22. Monday, 8 June 2015

A conversation conducted on Facebook messenger between:

 **B. Knight**  
Samwell grad, law school bound, dedicated naturist, best shit in town. He/him; answers to all.

Student at Harvard Law School  
Studied at Samwell College  
Lives in Somerville, Massachusetts  
From Newton, Massachusetts

and

 **Eric R. Bittle**  
Baker, former figure skater, and the shortest member of the Samwell hockey team!

Kitchen Supervisor at Camp Oconee  
Studies at Samwell College  
Lives in Samwell, Massachusetts  
From Madison, Georgia

* * *

**B. Knight**  
Are you on brah?  
Please, dude.  
Little green thing says you’re on.  
Don’t leave me alone with these capitalist motherfuckers.

 **Eric R. Bittle**  
Shitty?

 **B. Knight**  
Thank fuck.

 **Eric R. Bittle**  
Shits, are you high?

 **B. Knight**  
Not high enough.

 **Eric R. Bittle**  
So … why exactly are you high at quarter past ten in the morning?

 **B. Knight**  
The sire decided I should accompany him and some gentlemen assholes to Hyannisport this morning for a round of what I like to call sticks-and-balls.  
Sticks and balls. Has a nice ring, yes?

 **Eric R. Bittle**  
Your dad thought it was a good idea to take you … to a golf course.

 **B. Knight**  
Fucker.  
Turns out, country clubs are plentiful with locations in which to chill.  
And by chill I mean enjoy the delectable pleasure of a well-rolled joint.

 **Eric R. Bittle**  
I figured.  
Please tell me you’re not somewhere … high off the ground right now?  
I mean, unless Lardo is there to make sure you don’t fall.  
But I’m pretty sure Lardo is in Boston.

 **B. Knight**  
It is true and tragical that my best bro Lardo is unable to partake this morning.  
She’s infiltrated the territory of the capitalist swine.  
Behind enemy lines.  
As I will be come autumn.

 **Eric R. Bittle**  
*sigh*

At least you’ll get to see her on the weekend?  
Is she meeting you in Providence?

 **B. Knight**  
Nah, I’m picking her up in Quincy.  
Her mother likes me.  
I like her mother.  
Though not as much as I like Lardo.  
Lardo is a beaut.  
Beauty.  
Beautiful human being.

 **Eric R. Bittle**  
Right.

 **B. Knight**  
Hey!  
I haven’t talked to you since you came out little brah! Congrats!

 **Eric R. Bittle**  
Thanks, Shitty.  
You know you’ll always be my first 

**B. Knight**  
Aw shucks.

But seriously, Bits. I’m proud of you.  
You done good.

 **Eric R. Bittle**  
Yeah. It’s … it’s been kinda surreal, you know?

And … you know how sometimes you find out something about your parents that, like, makes you see everything you thought you understood about them in a whole new light?

 **B. Knight**  
You mean like that time I discovered dear dad fucking his secretary?

 **Eric R. Bittle**  
… kind of the opposite of that.  
But yeah, I guess.

I can’t really explain right now but I learned some stuff about why my parents made the decisions they did that … makes a lot of things I thought I understood about my childhood seem … really different.

I’m not sure what to think yet.

 **B. Knight**  
All part of growing up, little brah.

Man. Everything here’s so fucking green, Bits! You should see it.  
The trees and the grass and the trees!  
All so fucking green.

 **Eric R. Bittle**  
Please just don’t CLIMB the trees, Shitty, okay?  
Can you do that for me?  
For me and Lardo?

Why aren’t you talking to Lardo, anyway?

 **B. Knight**  
Spying. She’s spying.  
In a meeting.  
Undercover as a wage slave.

 **Eric R. Bittle**  
Right.  
*sigh*

I just don’t want to have to explain to Jack why you’re in the hospital with a broken leg instead of visiting him in Pawtucket. He’s ordered inflatable mattresses and everything!

 **B. Knight**  
AHA!  
YOU.  
You are the little shit responsible for the mattresses!  
I was informed of the mattresses.  
Jack ordered TWO.  
You are cock-blocking me from his couch.

 **Eric R. Bittle**  
Jack calls it OUR couch.  


**B. Knight**  
Beautiful.  
Your love is a beautiful thing.

I’m really not that stoned, Bits.  
  
I’m just bored.  
  
And I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing going to Harvard Law School.  
They want me to become one of THEM Bits.  
Fuckers.  
I will defy them.

 **Eric R. Bittle**  
Yeah you will.

You know we got your back, Shits.  
Me and Jack and Lardo and everyone else on the team.

 **B. Knight**  
Thanks brah.

 **Eric R. Bittle**  
I gotta get ready for work, okay Shitty?  
I’m switching to my phone but message if you need me, okay? And I’ll respond when I can.

  
**B. Knight**  
Go on.  
Can’t keep the wage-slave from his work.

 **Eric R. Bittle**  
Nope.

Stay out of the trees, Shits.

 **B. Knight**  
You ruin all the fun little brah.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shitty's "everything's so fucking green" is a nod to [Death at a Funeral](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0795368/) (2007).


	23. Tuesday, 9 June 2015

“Ben?” Georgia confirms when her assistant picks up his phone, talking through the hands-free dashboard hook-up as the light changes green and she accelerates through the intersection.

“Here,” he confirms. “What’s up?”

“Babysitter’s down with a migraine. With Joelle in the middle of that three-day workshop I’ve got Emmy for the day. Can you reschedule any meetings I can’t attend remotely, and move those I can to conference call? I’m on my way in to pick up that stack of applications so I can work through the candidates at home today.”

“Sure thing,” She hears the scratch of a pen on Ben’s ever-present notepad.

“I’ll check in with you when I get there. We should be there in fifteen, twenty minutes depending on traffic.”

“No problem. See you when you get here!”

She disconnects the call and glances in the rear view mirror to where Emmy is amusing herself -- for now -- strapped into her car seat with a board book.

“So it’s you and Mama today, right mija?” She asks.

“Mama!” Emmy agrees. “Em! Drive car?”

“Yup, we’re in the car. We’re going to Mama’s work -- remember Mama’s work?”

“Bean,” Emmy agrees.

“That’s right, work is where Bean is.” Emmy likes dogs -- the bigger and calmer the better -- and Bean is the most patient labrador retriever Georgia’s ever met. She lets Emmy use her as pillow and as a step-stool to climb on and off the couches in the players’ lounge.

By the time Georgia gets through Providence traffic and pulls into the parking lot, parks the car, and extracts her daughter from the car seat, it’s closer to twenty-five minutes than the hoped for fifteen. Then Emmy fusses about being carried, so they walk across the parking lot to the double glass doors of the staff entrance with the agonizingly slow fits and starts of a two-and-a-half year-old.

Ben finds Georgia while she and Emmy are still marveling at the glory of the glass doors that push open and shut without a latch. In the past several months, Emmy has developed an obsession with opening and shutting things, especially doors, which makes going in and coming out of any space an exercise in either strategic extraction and diversion or parental patience.

On the positive side, if either Georgia or Joelle needs a way to entertain the sprog all they need to do is put her in front of the swinging kitchen door or unlatch the screen door out to the back porch and it’s instant distraction.

“Hey George -- hey Emmy,” Ben says, “I left those applications on your desk George, and cancelled everything but the 3pm with Frank you were going to take by phone anyway?”

“Thanks, Ben -- you’re a wonder.”

“Eh,” he waves the praise away a usual, “ ‘s what you pay me the big bucks for, right?”

“Emmy, pumpkin, not that way--” Georgia reaches down and stops her daughter from running back out into the parking lot. “Still, I appreciate it. Have we gotten the proofs back on the those sponsorship materials for YPI? They wanted everything in by the end of the week and I want Paul to sign off. I’ll confirm with Frank today if he plans to present the awards at the gala himself, or whether he wants us to recruit one of the players.”

“I’ll check in with Amani about the proofs but I don’t think we’ve seen them. If they come in, I’ll make sure they end up on your desk.”

“Right thanks -- sorry you were on your way --” she gestures in the direction he was headed, back out toward the parking lot.

“No problem, boss -- you and Emmy have a good day! See you tomorrow?”

“If Esmé’s back on her feet, yes. I’ll be in touch if we’re still in a bind.”

Ben salutes and heads out as Georgia reaches above Emmy’s head and pushes the door all the way open to head into the building.

“Bean!” Emmy says, emphatically, when they reach the corridor that leads to the players’ lounge.

“We just need to stop by Mama’s office first, pumpkin,” Georgia responds, bending over to scoop Emmy up so they can navigate the stairs to the suite of rooms on the second second-floor where the team of general managers have their offices. But just as she does so, the door of the lounge opens and Bean pads out followed closely by Jack.

“Bean, Mama, Bean!” Emmy squeals, wriggling away from Georgia’s grasp and barrelling down the hallway at a speed Georgia would have sworn she was incapable of two weeks ago.

“Hey, whoa there,” Jack says, putting a hand out to keep Bean to heel, and dropping to his knee beside the dog.

“It’s okay,” Georgia calls, following after her daughter. “They know each other. Bean lets this little rugrat climb all over her.”

Jack kneels back, but keeps his hand on Bean’s back. The dog wags her tail at Emmy’s approach and lets Emmy bury her hands in the dog’s fur. Georgia comes up and lets Bean lick her own hand before giving the dog a scratch on the head.

“Jack, I don’t think you’ve met my daughter Emmy yet.”

“Hi Emmy,” Jack says. She’s usually shy around the players, although she’s warmed to a couple of the guys who have kids of their own. The ones who know how to get down on her level -- like Jack’s done, Georgia realizes. Which might be part of why Emmy doesn’t bury her face in Bean’s fur, like she often will when she’s not ready to interact with new people, and instead reaches her arms out in expectation of being picked up.

“Hey,” Jack says, with a smile that reaches his eyes. “You like hugs? I sometimes like hugs too.” He lifts her up and lets her balance on his folded knees.

Georgia raises and eyebrow, “You should know she doesn’t do that with just anyone.”

Jack shrugs. “Neither do I.”

Emmy puts a hand in her mouth and plops herself in Jack’s lap, looking back up at her mother for approval.

Georgia laughs. “You got a minute? I just need to run upstairs for a few files -- we’re working at home today.”

“Sure,” Jack says. “I was just going to take Bean out for a walk but -- we can wait ‘til you’re done?”

“You keep that up,” Georgia nods at where Emmy is curled, “and I might be tempted to hire you away as nanny.”

“Come back to me a month into the season and I might just take you up on it,” Jack grins.

Georgia snorts. “Right. I’m pretty sure we couldn’t afford you.”

Jack negates the point with a wave of his hand. “Friends and family rate. I used to look after my cousins when they were this age. I’d be happy to spend time with Emmy, if you and your wife need a break. Especially in the off-season, there’s a lot of time in the day, eh? I like being on my own but -- kids are easy.”

Georgia raises an eyebrow and considers her daughter and her rookie sitting there on the hallway floor.

“Says you. Wait 'til you have one of your own.”

“Mostly, I like to borrow other peoples',” Jack says, with another one of those rare, genuine smiles of his. “Then I get to give ‘em back at the end of the day.”

“Right well --” Georgia shakes her head, already thinking of how she’ll tell this story to Joelle over dinner. “I’ll be just a few minutes, if you’re sure?”

“We’re good,” Jack says, settling back against the wall as Emmy reaches out to tug at Bean’s fur. “Take whatever time you need.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YPI is [Youth Pride Inc.](http://youthprideri.org/) of Rhode Island, a local organization for LGBTQQ young people. They have no knowledge of the fact that they are fictionally sponsored by a fictional sports team with a very queer agenda.
> 
> I went looking on the Internet for spanish terms of endearment for children that a Mexcian-American mother might use for her child (since I head!canon Georgia as someone with Mexican-American heritage). The Internet offered me [cariño](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cari%C3%B1o) for "darling" or "sweetheart". If any of you are Spanish speakers and wish to offer a better substitute, please don't hesitate to speak up!
> 
>  **Update:** Thank you all for the language assist! I changed George's term of affection to "mi hija" ("my daughter ") which several of you suggested.  <3
> 
>  **Update 2:** Thank you all _again_ for the language assist! Folks seem to feel "mija" would be the more informal, familiar form so I am making that additional change.  <3 <3


	24. Wednesday, 10 June 2015

Between four and four-thirty in the afternoon, Eric and the three other members of the afternoon kitchen crew take a mid-shift break to eat an early meal before madness descends with the five o’clock dinner hour. They tend to sit at a table in the main dining room just off the kitchen, scrolling through social media on their phones and gossiping.

The second shift is all returning counselors -- Eric, Skye, Steph, and Will -- so they’ve been casual friends since the summer before and loosely connected on Facebook and Twitter over the past year. Eric’s had a vague sense of changes in relationship status, spring break travels, progress made toward various educational goals. Skye and her boyfriend of two years are engaged and planning a wedding for the following June. Will is starting at Tennessee State University in the fall, after finishing his associate's degree at Oconee and taking a year off to work with AmeriCorps. Steph had spent her spring break in Honduras volunteering at a school with her sorority sisters.

“I guess I just never saw the point of pledging,” Skye was saying today, in response to one of Steph’s stories about rushing at Georgia Tech.

Steph shrugs. “I was looking for a place to live after the freshman dorms, right? And everyone on my floor was rushing. If you didn’t rush, you didn’t have a life on the weekends -- you know?”

Skye looks at her dubiously. “Maybe it’s different if you don’t have a team -- I spent the time I wasn’t studying with the swimmers, and most weekends at meets or in practice.” She looks over at Eric, who’s considering the balance of cinnamon and orange in today’s vanilla and blackberry parfait. “You play hockey, Eric,” Skye says, “Back me up here.”

“Yeah, but he lives in some sort of fraternity house for hockey players,” Steph says. “It’s like a fraternity that, you know, happens to play hockey.”

Eric laughs, “Yeah, in Rans and Holster’s wet dreams. But we do throw a mean kegster on occasion. And we’re the only house at Samwell where you’ll be guaranteed not only cheap beer but also pie.”

Skye shudders. “I’ve never understood how you guys do it, the partying and still you end up in the final four. I guess some swimmers do, but -- I know I couldn’t keep it up.”

Eric shrugs, thinking back to the last few parties they’d had at the Haus. “There’s always a few kids you have to watch out for -- but most people learn their own tolerance a few months into their first year. My boyfriend was always at the kegsters but he hardly drank at all. He’d nurse one beer all night long and no one ever called him on it.”

Not that Eric has anything approaching objectivity in the matter, but he’d like to think that he manages to make _my boyfriend_ sound casual, not forced. Like he hasn’t been sitting at lunch all week waiting for some sort of opportunity to reference Jack without naming names. To say _my boyfriend_ like it’s the sort of thing you just say without sweating and feeling slightly nauseated by the unpredictability of people's reactions. Like Will might say, “My girlfriend’s picking me up tonight,” or Steph might talk about what a drag it was when her Junior-year boyfriend was in Berlin for the spring semester.  
  
All through high school and into college Eric imagined, longingly, being one of the people who got to do that, one of the lucky, confident people who breezily identified themselves in relation to others in that way. He’s watched peoples’ statuses on Facebook shift in and out of various permutations of _in a relationship with…_ and thought enviously about what it would be like not to move through the world in the singular for a while, maybe eventually for always.

Now he’s said it aloud, familiarly, _possessively_. Said _my boyfriend_ in front of a table of people who -- while they didn’t know him in high school -- do know him _in Georgia,_ who are friends with friends who might know or be related to someone Eric went to school with. And he hasn’t said _Jack_ but he’s definitely said _boy_.

There’s an almost imperceptible hitch in the conversation. For a minute Eric thinks he’s made _huge_ mistake. Part of him had almost hoped that, the first time he said it people wouldn’t actually hear him. Or think they’d misheard him. Hoped that he’d be able to say it in public without actually having to face any meaningful response.

“Yeah,” Steph says, finally, nodding, “I knew a Theta who’d do that. He had a little sister and I think he felt responsible for the pledges who might do something stupid.”

Eric carves a bit of parfait out of his dish with his spoon, but sees the others nodding in his peripheral vision. Skye, sitting next to him, leans over slightly and nudges him with her shoulder. “Leave it to you to find a responsible one,” she says with approval.

“The big question, obviously,” Will says from across the table, “is whether this boy appreciates Eric’s pies with the degree of reverence they deserve.”

“Oh yeah,” Eric says, feeling the stupid smile spread across his face. “Yeah, he does.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the delay on this one - we were on the road all yesterday and I feel asleep at 8:30 last night! clearly the week was catching up with me.


	25. Thursday, 11 June 2015

Jack’s trying and failing to understand the directions for the the hand pump that’s come with the inflatable mattresses when his father calls.

“Salut,” he says, rocking back on his heels and rising to his feet to walk over to the tall living room windows while he talks.

“Jack, I just thought I’d call and see how things are going,” Bob speaks in French, like he often does when it’s just the two of them. It’s a habit they fell into when Jack was very small and Bob and Alicia were encouraging him to grow up bilingual.

“Good, they’re good,” Jack watches a heron rise up from the reeds at the bank of the river and fly off toward where the evening sun is dropping toward the edge of the trees. “Shitty and Lardo are driving down tomorrow, to spend a few days. They’re gonna come to the community skate on Saturday morning. I told Shitty I expect him to get his ass out on the ice.”

“Mom said you were working with the kids last weekend -- it’s good to hear they’re putting your coaching skills to good use already.”

“It’s nice,” Jack says. “I’d forgotten how much I missed working with the kids. I always thought maybe I could volunteer during the school year but -- there was never enough time.”

“And you’re settling in with the team?”

Jack had been less than a year old when his father had joined the Penguins, and he’s never thought to wonder what it had been like for Bob to suddenly be playing with an entirely different set of teammates.

“It’s -- I mean right now it all feels a bit like summer training, you know?” He says, thinking back on summers spent at various camps where you get to know the guys and then everyone goes their separate ways at the end of it. “I keep looking for Bitty or Chowder on the ice, expect to see Rans and Holster instead of the Falconers’ defense. It probably won’t really hit me until August that I’m not going back.”

“I’m sure you’ll be fine, son,” Bob says.

“Yeah,” Jack sighs, not sure his father actually understands his disorientation. Even when Bob was playing in Pittsburgh, he and Alicia and infant Jack had spent most of their summers in Montréal where the Zimmermanns were close to Bob’s former teammates. But most of them had had wives with jobs, a house, kids in school. Even the few who -- like Jack and his parents -- traveled together as a family during the season still owned houses they’d return to in the off-season. College is … different. Jack’s been through four years of watching teammates graduate full of promises to stay in touch only to have them drift off into their lives beyond Samwell until one day they’ve left the group text entirely. Johnson being the exception (but then again Johnson is the exception to many things).

He’s heard from some of the guys that more teammates have stayed active in the Facebook group but the idea of setting up a social media profile still sends him into a cold sweat. Maybe when Bitty is here in August they can do it together. He’s gathered from listening to the guys talk in the locker room that some of them have public and private social media accounts. Which means there must be a way to set one up so he can keep up with friends but not talk to the entire world with the press of a button.

“And how’s Eric doing?” Bob asks, pulling Jack’s attention back to the present.

“He seems good,” Jack says, aware that this sounds bland. He and Bitty have been texting a lot but it’s been hard to find a time to FaceTime or talk on the phone now that the camp session has started. Bitty wakes up when Jack’s at practice and while some days they can catch each other over breakfast, if Jack has morning meetings they have to make do with asynchronous texting. Or a brief call at the end of the night when Eric’s home from work around nine or ten.

“He said last night he mentioned a boyfriend to his co-workers and no one reacted badly. Not my name, just that he was seeing someone.”

“You know your mother and I want you both to do what you feel comfortable doing,” Bob says. “We’d be proud of you, and support you however we can, if you decide to come out publicly.” Jack can hear the hesitation in his father’s voice. “But we also -- it may not be easy. And you don’t owe the public that information about yourself.”

“No, but --” Jack hesitates himself. “--I think I might owe myself and Eric. We’ve been talking about it. Now that he’s out to his parents. I -- I pushed him too hard last week, wanting to talk to George. So -- we’re gonna wait at least until after I see him in Georgia. Maybe when he’s here in August...” he trails off.

He’s still struggling with the shame of having miscalculated so badly the week before, with the guilt of not realizing how _alone_  and left behind Bitty had been feeling in Madison. How paralyzed at the thought of public exposure -- even when public exposure came in the form of sharing their relationship with trusted friends. It’s shaken Jack, a bit, to realize how hard it is to read Bitty over the phone, even with a video feed; how much pain Bitty’s able to hide so successfully. He’s still not sure what to do with that knowledge -- except, for the moment, count the days until he’s back in Eric’s space and he can assess what’s going on through touch as well as visuals and tone of voice and what Eric is able to tell him.

Telling Suzanne and Coach, though, seems to have opened the floodgates and now, barely a week later, here Eric is boldly trying out the words "...my boyfriend..." in front of his fellow camp counselors.

Jack had found himself falling a little bit more in love with Bitty when he told that story, the evening before, voice full of both relief and an undercurrent of sass. It’s the tone of voice that suggests _just you try_ to question Eric’s presence (on the hockey team), his skill (baking pies), his taste in music (not Jack’s). This was the Eric Jack is used to: boldly insisting on his right to be in Jack’s space. He realizes, now, looking back over the previous year, that this had been Bitty being brave. Bitty _flirting_ with him. Uncertain of his reception, Bitty had still been willing to say in a thousand different interactions _I want_ and _I am._

Even though he'd gone unnamed, Jack knows Bitty _laid claim_ to him at that table down in Georgia the day before.

And he’s looking forward to the moment when Eric will let Jack claim him back.


	26. Friday, 12 June 2015

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m posting tonight because it’s important to me to keep telling this story of acceptance and celebration and happy endings. But my thoughts are with all of those affected by the massacre in Orlando. 
> 
> And if any readers need support tonight [The Trevor Project](http://www.thetrevorproject.org/blog/entry/statement-from-the-trevor-project%20), an LGBTQ youth crisis intervention organization, has 24/7 services available by telephone, text, and chat.

It was nearly ten by the time Eric got home on Friday. Friday night was build-your-own-Sundae night at Camp Oconee which inevitably led to more clean-up since kids spilled sprinkles and sprayed whipped cream everywhere and dripped cherry juice on the floors so that a thorough mopping was in order. 

Build-your-own-Sundae night, Eric thought tiredly as he pulled the truck into his parents’ driveway and killed the lights, was not unlike a non-alcoholic kegster that he and the kitchen crew couldn’t enlist the campers to clean up themselves the following morning.

His parents were in bed, but his mother had left a plate of leftover macaroni and cheese and a salad for him on the kitchen counter. He’s always hungry when he gets home, since the kitchen crew eats early and then it’s frenetic activity between five and eight or nine when they shut the kitchen down for the evening, sparkling clean and ready for the morning crew to arrive at four. Sometimes -- like after scrubbing cherry juice and sprinkles off the concrete floors of the hall -- Eric swears he never wants to eat again. But then he gets home to a meal that he doesn’t have to cook himself and his stomach starts to rumble.

He sits down at the table and calls Jack, putting the phone on speaker so they can talk while he eats.

“Hey Bits,” Jack picks up, voice soft with sleep.

“I didn’t wake you, did I sweetheart?” Eric asks, even though they’d agreed earlier to a call when he got home from work.

“Not really,” Jack yawns. “Monsieur Éléphant and I were just lying here listening to Vinyl Cafe.”

“To what?”

Jack laughs. “It’s a Canadian radio program we used to listen to when I was a kid. I mean, it’s still on the air but they probably don’t broadcast it down in Georgia.”

Eric shakes his head, his mouth full of mac and cheese, and then remembers they’re not on video feed. “I’ve never heard of it?” he says, after swallowing.

“It’s a lot like -- what’s that one that Holster likes to listen to? A Prairie Home Companion? Only more music. And Stuart McLean, the host, tells stories about this fictional family…” Jack trails off. “I’ll send you a few of my favorites, if you want?”

“I’d like that.” Eric smiles at the thought of listening to something that Jack listened to as a little kid. “You all ready for Shitty and Lardo to arrive tomorrow?”

Jack laughs. “Lardo is going to have to help me figure out the air mattresses; I tried inflating one last night but it took forever and still leaked somehow.”

“Lardo’ll fix it. You know Shitty’s just gonna want to crash on the couch, right?” Eric points out. “He’s already asked me for permission to bro-snuggle with you on the couch.”

“What did you say?” Jack’s amused.

“I negotiated bro-cuddles on the condition he remain fully clothed -- meaning underwear, pants, and shirt -- and of course one foot on the floor.”

“Isn’t there supposed to be something about room for the holy ghost?”

“I don’t know what they hold up there in Montréal but I doubt the preachers down here in Georgia had in mind hockey players cuddling on the sofa,” Eric says dryly, dropping his dishes in the sink and navigating his way upstairs in the dark.

“I’m not sure any religious authorities can be expected to take Shitty into account when outlining their sexual mores,” Jack responds. “Do I get any say in this question of bro-cuddles?”

Eric swallows. “You know you do. But -- it doesn’t seem fair that Shitty gets to cuddle with you on the couch before I do.”

“It’s completely not fair.” Jack yawns again. “You changed your ticket yet for August? I meant it about paying the change fee.”

“I know you did.” Eric sighs. “But I can’t -- I don’t wanna get used to you just paying to make things easier. How about we split it fifty-fifty? I’m calling them in the morning and I’ll let you know the details. I’m flying into Boston.”

“Fifty-fifty. Okay,” Jack agrees. “I’ll remind you if you don’t tell me how much.”

“I know.”

“I should get to sleep. I’m meeting Lardo and Shitty at the arena at 9:30 tomorrow morning for the community skate -- we’ll call tomorrow night?”

“I’m counting on it.”

“I miss you and I love you,” Jack says, softly.

“I love you and I miss you,” Eric responds, trying and failing to remember a time when ending a conversation with Jack using those words hadn’t been the most natural thing in the world.

By the time he gets back from brushing his teeth, YouTube links for The Vinyl Cafe are waiting in his inbox. He climbs into bed and settles down with Señor Bun to listen to Jack’s radio program and imagine they’re falling asleep listening together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The Vinyl Cafe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vinyl_Cafe) is delightful in every way. I think one of Jack's favorites is probably the episode featuring [the story of Morley and the jock strap](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UU-xC1gTvzk%20) (9:17).
> 
> Even though this story happens in the past, it feels weird not to acknowledge today’s mass shooting in Orlando. As I post this story, at least fifty people are known to have been killed in what is now [the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history](http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/06/12/481744095/police-say-multiple-victims-after-shooting-at-orlando-nightclub). It happened at a gay night club during pride month. The crime was, as far as we know at this point, motivated by hate for and dehumanization of people in the queer community. People like my wife and I, and many of our closest friends. People like Jack and Eric, Billy and Yannick, Georgia and Joelle, Ransom and Holster, Dex and Nursey, and Coach. 
> 
> There have been times writing this story when I’ve wondered whether I am exaggerating Bitty’s fear about being out as a young gay man. I’ve questioned whether Coach and Suzanne had legitimate (albeit poorly expressed) fears about disclosing Coach’s bisexuality to their son, of imagining he could not be himself in their hometown. I purposefully write my fic to be a little bit closer to the future we want, full of acceptance and celebration and happy endings. And my wife and I have been blessed with family and friends who do support us. In that privileged context the idea of living in daily fear of hate for who we are can feel extreme. My father-in-law asked me yesterday morning why people even celebrate pride anymore -- because ideally (to his mind) being gay would be unremarkable rather than something worthy of public statement. I quibbled with him then, but today I have an even more stark example of why Pride matters and why people like Coach and Bitty struggle to be out without looking over their shoulders. 
> 
> My love to you all. Be kind, and remember to look for the helpers.


	27. Saturday, 13 June 2015

Another conversation in Twitter DM between:

 **@larrisart**  
Painting. Hockey. Stony more than Stucky. Trash Black Widow and I will end you.

 **@omgcheckplease**  
Baker, former figure skater, and the shortest member of the Samwell hockey team!

* * *

**@larrisart**  
You know what is boring?  
Watching hockey players skate when you’re not being paid to do it, that’s what

 **@omgcheckplease**  
Told you it’s past time you learned how to skate, Lardo

 **@larrisart**  
No no nooooooooo  
Human beings are not meant to fling themselves about on the ice while wearing sharp bits of metal  
You are all crazy people

Don’t tell Shitty I said “crazy people”  
He’s trying to eliminate ableist slurs from his vocabulary

 **@omgcheckplease**  
Did Jack get Shitty on skates?

 **@larrisart**  
Are you kidding?  
Dude might pretend he doesn’t care but he’s just as star-struck as the rest of ‘em  
He couldn’t stop talking on the drive down about skating with the Falconers

Also, you should know  
Because you will want to be prepared  
Your boyfriend is THE CUTEST THING EVER with kids

 **@omgcheckplease**  
...@_@  
HOW CAN YOU SAY THESE THINGS WHEN I AM STUCK IN GEORGIA

 **@larrisart**  
I’m telling you: It’s important to be prepared

You might want to watch, like, several hours of videos of baby red pandas to steel yourself  
Or baby sloths taking a bath  
Or kittens tumbling with … puppy otters  
LITERALLY ANYTHING to desensitize yourself to cute  
Or you will lose your fillings

 **@omgcheckplease**  
WORTH IT

 **@larrisart**  
Dude. I’m screencapping this conversation so when your dental bills arrive you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

 **@omgcheckplease**  
I am so jealous right now it’s not even funny  


**@larrisart**  
Sorry Bits :-/  
It’s gotta blow to be stuck down there right when you two FINALLY sorted your shit

 **@omgcheckplease**  
It does  
It really does  
OMG :-(

So what are you gonna do the rest of the day?

 **@larrisart**  
Go back to Jack’s place  
Shitty wants to go visit H.P. Lovecraft’s grave - I guess he’s buried somewhere nearby?  
And some Civil War guy too  
Jack found his name while we were looking for Lovecraft and got all excited  
Anyway: GRAVES. WHOO HOO.

And then I’m making them watch the first episode of Sense8 because DUDE.  
Have you SEEN IT YET?

 **@omgcheckplease**  
Sense8?

 **@larrisart**  
Ooooh. Dude. It is KICK ASS.  
You should totally watch it with us  
We’ll Skype you in or something

 **@omgcheckplease**  
I can’t :-(  
Camp  
I’ll be at work until at least nine

 **@larrisart**  
Damn. Okay well  
You have Netflix, right?  
You should watch it tonight  
And then we can talk about it over breakfast!  
It’ll be like post-game waffles at the Haus  
Only for movies

 **@omgcheckplease**  
I have Netflix  
*Googling*

How have I not heard about this yet???

 **@larrisart**  
Georgia?

 **@omgcheckplease**  
God. Probably

 **@larrisart**  
Okay gotta go - Jack and Shitty are here  
Shitty says “What motherfucking lies are you telling about me on the Internet”  
Jack says “Tell Bitty hi” … so “hi” from Jack  
  
What time should we call you in the morning??

 **@omgcheckplease**  
Um… what time will y’all be up?

 **@larrisart**  
I’ll check with Jack and let you know

 **@omgcheckplease**  
Oh! I told him you’d help with the air mattresses  
The directions were confusing

 **@larrisart**  
On it.

 **@omgcheckplease**  
Remind Shitty of the rules. Shirt. Pants. Underwear. One foot on the floor.

 **@larrisart**  
Got your back, bro.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Sense8](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense8) was released through Netflix on June 5, 2015. It's doing some wonderful things with the power of relationships and queer desire. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend checking it out.
> 
> [H.P. Lovecraft](http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/hp-lovecrafts-grave) is buried at Swan Point Cemetery as is Sullivan Ballou, whose death at the Second Battle of Bull Run during the American Civil War was immortalized in Ken Burn's Civil War documentary through [the reading of Ballou's final letter to his wife, Sarah](https://www.nps.gov/resources/story.htm?id=253).


	28. Sunday, 14 June 2015

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm loving each and every one of your comments, all you wonderful readers! I promise to respond when time and energy returns <3

Lardo and Shitty just left and the apartment feels empty.  
Monsieur Éléphant and I are sad.

_Oh honey_  
_Wishing Señor Bun and I could cuddle you both_

_Will asks if I’m texting my boyfriend_  
_I have the worst poker face_  


Another thing we have in common.

_Says the man who kept his crush on me SECRET FOR SIX MONTHS_

Does it count as a secret if I didn’t know?

_Mmm … I’m gonna go with YES_  
_But you’re a good kisser so I’ll forgive you_

I’m a good kisser?

 _That is what we would call leading the witness Mr. Zimmermann_  
_...but_

I’ll take that as a yes.

You are also a good kisser.

_I am?_

Now who’s fishing for compliments Bittle.

_No, it was genuine surprise_  
_I mean_  
_I haven’t had a lot of practice_

Again, something we have in common.

_Really?_  
_I thought...Kent?_

A little.  
He didn’t … he usually wanted to cut right to the chase.  
We didn’t do a lot of … everything else.

_Oh._  
_...I should probably say I’m sorry_  
_But_

It’s okay.  
I mean, it wasn’t.  
But I don’t want to go back and fix it now.  
I’d rather just learn with you.

_Oh_  
_Um_

_Just so you know, the rest of the table is probably TOTALLY aware you’re flirting with me_  
_Even though they don’t know who you are_

I like it when you’re a little bit flushed.

_So our relationship going to consist of you saying things to make me blush outrageously_

I’m pretty sure we knew that already.  
I’m open to suggestions if you want to even the score?

 _Way to put a boy on the spot!!_  


_Your hands are … nice and, um, large?_  
_Which sounds like a dirty joke_  
_But isn’t I swear_  
_Not that dirty jokes are bad_  
_I just_  
_I like the way your hands are big enough that you can wrap them around my feet_  
_Or my wrists_  
_It’s … comforting_  
_And … hot_  
_I think about your hands a lot TBH_

TBH?  
Oh. Right. Never mind.

Well, I only have Monsieur Éléphant for independent verification, but he says I am blushing.

_Yeah?_

Yes, Bits.  
Thinking about touching you makes my palms tingle.  
I’ve been…  
I’ve been touching myself, a little, thinking of you touching me.  
Or touching you instead of myself.

_I AM AT WORK OH MY GOD_  
_KEEP GOING_

So what do you want to hear more about?  
Me touching you?  
You touching me?

_ALL OF IT_  
  
_Except, damn it, I have to go put the spaghetti sauce back on_

Sorry.  
Sorry Bits.

_DO NOT APOLOGIZE MR._  
_We will be talking about this again later_

What time are you getting home tonight?

_Probably about the usual time_

Talk to you then?

_Talk to you then_

What was it you did?  
and ?

  
_You’re learning!_  
_and_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I ended up not writing about Sunday brunch, but imagine that Lardo and Shitty dragged Jack off to [Modern Diner](https://moderndinerri.com/) for lots of protein :-D


	29. Monday, 15 June 2015

**To:** Suzanne Bittle  <suzanne2ndhand@gmail.com>  
**From:** Alicia A. Zimmermann  <alicia@zimmermann.org>  
**Sent:** Monday, Jun 15, 2015 at 7:32 AM  
**Subject:** Sylvie’s Butter Tarts

Dear Suzanne,

I was finally at book club last Thursday and remembered to ask Sylvie for her maple butter tart recipe. I have attached the scan of the recipe card she sent me - it has metric measurements but rather than try to do the conversions myself I thought you would prefer to have the recipe as provided! Let me know if I can help translating - after thirty years switching back and forth from one system to the other I feel fairly confident about where to skip and where to be generous.

How are you and Rich doing this week? I know from Jack that last week was a busy one for Eric. Has he spoken with you any further?

I realize I said this in my last email, and don’t mean to push or pry, but Bob and I have been in where you are in very broad terms -- a son who came out to us after successfully hiding his anxiety about being gay (among other things) for years. So please don’t hesitate to email or call if you need someone to talk to who understands how complicated these family conversations can be.

Salut,  
Alicia

* * *

**To:** Alicia A. Zimmermann  <alicia@zimmermann.org>  
**From:** Suzanne Bittle  <suzanne2ndhand@gmail.com>  
**Sent:** Monday, Jun 15, 2015 at 1:56 PM  
**Subject:** RE: Sylvie’s Butter Tarts

Dear Alicia,

Oh my goodness, thank you! This is just the thing for Dickey and I to make as a special treat for the potluck next Sunday. It’s a christening Sunday with three little ones being welcomed into the congregation and we always try to do something a little special on those occasions.

I’ll be sure to let you know if Dickey and I can’t work out the conversions.

I do truly appreciate your support for our family. Dickey hasn’t said much, yet, and I thought it best to give him a little space. We had been expecting this day for years and somehow it still caught us by surprise, do you know? I think Rich and I had been thinking for so long it would be someday in the future we forgot that our little boy is now twenty years old and a young man!

I know Dickey’s told Jack this (we’ve asked him not to tell anyone else for now) and with Rich’s permission I am sharing this in strict confidence: Rich himself has, in the past, been in relationships with men. He considers himself to be bisexual although we don’t talk openly about it because it would almost certainly mean the loss of his job with the school system. We actually met, back in college, because for a brief period we were dating men who happened to be roommates -- and then the following year took the same political science class together. Once we were together it … at the time (perhaps even still today) if you were a man dating a woman you were looked on with suspicion by the gay community. Rich never really felt welcome, particularly once we were a couple.

So we didn’t … we both knew about and were comfortable with the fact he dated men in the past but we never talked about it. It was safer to half forget it rather than constantly remember not to speak of it, if that makes any sense.

But of course, we should have told Dickey, I can see that so clearly now. We thought -- at first we couldn’t tell him as a child because you never know what children will say. We couldn’t have something slip out. We started to notice the signs in grade school that he ... but as Rich likes to remind me, being a figure skater or a baker or a fan of pop music or shirts in lavender and buttercup doesn’t indicate the first thing about a person’s sexual orientation. He could have grown up to be straight and made the girls very happy with all that baking, you see? So we thought we shouldn’t pressure him. I knew he'd started talking about liking boys on his vlog and thought he would tell us when he was ready. I had a mother who was constantly asking me about boys and I wanted to give Dickey more privacy to explore his feelings.

We thought he ought to find his own way. And we thought he knew how PROUD we were of him. I am heartsick that he thought we might … reject that part of who he is.

Rich is taking him out hiking on Wednesday morning and I’m hoping they’ll find a way to talk it out between the two of them. Words don’t come easy to Rich, but I know he has some things he wants to say to his son.

Does the worry ever stop? My Dickey is so brave and yet as a mother I want to hide him away where the bigots and bullies will never be able to find him.

In treasured friendship,  
Suzanne

* * *

**To:** Suzanne Bittle  <suzanne2ndhand@gmail.com>  
**From:** Alicia A. Zimmermann  <alicia@zimmermann.org>  
**Sent:** Monday, Jun 15, 2015 at 4:16 PM  
**Subject:** RE: Sylvie’s Butter Tarts

Dear Suzanne,

Thank you for trusting us with this part of your family’s story. May I share this with Bob, or do you prefer that I keep it in confidence? It is so frustrating that people like you and Rich or Jack and Eric need to make calculations about physical safety and financial security around such commonplaces as speaking openly about past relationships or acting like a couple in public. These are experiences that Bob and I have never lived first-hand, only secondarily as we support Jack’s right to decide when and how to share this part of himself and his experience with more people.

Have I mentioned how happy I am (we both are) for Eric and Jack? I don’t think you have seen the two of them together as much as Bob and I have but I hope you have also seen how simply besotted they are with one another. On Jack’s graduation day it was so clear how comfortable they were in one another’s orbit -- even though it took Bob practically shoving Jack off in Eric’s direction to get them (or at least Jack) to see it! Jack’s happiness radiated from him all during our vacation on the Cape -- and I hope you have seen similar for Eric.

It is Jack’s thriving in the world, and being with people who make him happy, that is most important to me. Of course I worry. Every day. I have woken every day since Jack’s overdose thinking how thankful I am that he is still alive and that we have yet another day to share with him. I am his mother - I cannot help but worry that someone or something will try and succeed in taking him away from us (A car accident? A plane crash? A freak injury on the ice? A homophobic “fan”?). I try to carry my worry alongside my determination to support him living the life he is most happy living.

(I don’t always succeed -- my yoga instructor would say I need to practice more mindfulness.)

I will be thinking of Rich and Eric especially on Wednesday. Again (again!) please don’t hesitate to let us know if there is anything we can do to support you all.

Salut,  
Alicia

P.S. There’s a woman who runs an art gallery in Québec City that I think might be very interested in your work -- would you mind if I showed her the bowl you sent at Christmas? And a few examples from your website? Have you ever considered expanding your market into Canada?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Google informs me via search results that [these](http://www.canadianliving.com/food/baking_and_desserts/best_maple_butter_tarts.php) are the Best Maple Butter Tarts. So perhaps imagine these + some sort of Sylvie-specific addition. Cardamom? Rum?


	30. Tuesday, 16 June 2015

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is going up a day late! our houseguest left yesterday evening and my wife and I both crashed pretty hardcore. I sat down at the computer and, like, my brain refused to even creak. So here we are a day behind schedule.
> 
> I'm working tomorrow so I'm giving myself permission to put off the two-in-one-day update until Sunday when I'll have a bit more time to space out the chapters and clear my head between scenes. Thank you all for your patience and the continued avalanche of commentary. You are seriously THE BEST <3

_Bean is as finished with this team meeting as I am._  


  
She is so adorable!!

What’s the meeting about?

 _Falcs have a team meeting every Tuesday at 10am during the off season._  
_A little of everything._

 _A lot of the guys are on vacation right now._  
_I haven’t even seen a few of them since I started._

 _Today we had a presentation on next year’s sponsors._  
_Charity/partnership event updates._  
_Now Danielle from H.R. is talking about changes to health benefits, insurance options for the next fiscal year._  
_All stuff they just talked me through since I’m new._

So what you’re telling me is there are lots of doodles in the margin of your notebook  


_Ha. Ha._  
_Says the guy who spent fall semester fantasizing about my ... hands._

You didn’t even know that until three weeks ago

_And haven’t stopped thinking about it since._

ARE YOU TRYING TO KILL ME???

_No. I’m trying to get you to distract me from Danielle’s stupid duck slides._

...stupid duck slides.

_AFLAC?_

OH  
Well  
If that’s all I am, a *distraction*…

_How do I do the eye-rolling face?_

Ha. Ha.

Any good plans for this afternoon?

_Dev and Pogs invited me to go out to Wolf Hill Forest with them and Bean._

*Googling*  
You should take your camera!

_Planning on it._

Am I gonna get to meet your teammates when I’m there in August?

 _I hope so._  
_Shitty and Lardo did._  
_So even if we decided not to …_

I want to!  
I mean, meet your teammates.  
I know we’re gonna talk about the other thing.

 _My mom said your mom told her about your dad?_  
_That’s a convoluted question. But you know what I mean._

Wait, WHAT?  
She did???  


_That’s … not a good thing?_

It’s just … I don’t know  
They kept it a secret for twenty years and now they’re telling everyone??  
It doesn’t feel fair

 _Not everyone._  
_Mom said Suzanne asked her not to tell anyone but Papa._

THEY FORGOT TO TELL THEIR OWN SON FOR TWENTY YEARS.

 _I’m sorry, Bitty._  
_Parents are … complicated sometimes._  
_Have you tried talking with them about it?_

I’m not even sure what I want to say  
I feel like I don’t even know … I don’t even know my dad anymore  
I eat breakfast across the table from him and I think  
Here is a man who’s been in the closet for longer than I’ve been alive  
  
And I’m SO ANGRY  
  
But Jack … I realized yesterday, he was MY AGE when he started dating Mama  
Which means he was younger than I am now when he last …  
I mean, I can’t think about that  
I can’t even imagine what it would have been like  
To be a gay man in Durham in 1991

_You could always ask him._

Coach is a man of few words  
IN CASE YOU HADN’T NOTICED

_*eyeroll emoji*_

_My mom says your parents are trying to give you space._

HOW DOES YOUR MOTHER KNOW MORE THAN I DO??  
UGH

 _Mom is good at getting people to tell her things._  
_She’s professionally nosy about other people’s business._  
_IN CASE YOU HADN’T NOTICED_

Fine  
Use my own words against me  


_I learn from the best._

_Okay. Meeting’s breaking up. I gotta go._  
_Skype later?_

Skype later!  
Send me lots of puppy pictures!!  


_*kiss emoji*_  
_(Not nearly as nice as the real thing)_

…


	31. Wednesday, 17 June 2015

The alarm on Eric’s phone goes off at 6:30am and he rolls out of bed without really opening his eyes to pull on the clothes and sturdy hiking boots he’d set out the night before. He and Coach are going hiking together before Eric’s workday begins at noon.

Day hiking and weekend camping trips are something Eric and his dad used to do quite often when Eric was younger. Eric had never been enrolled in Boy Scouts -- now he has new suspicions why -- but Coach had been an Eagle Scout as a teenager and knew the ropes. Throughout college and the early years of their marriage the Bittles went camping regularly. Once Eric had been born, Suzanne pointed out that babies were difficult enough to care for with access to comfortable bedding, running water, and a washer and dryer in the basement. So the overnight trips had ceased, temporarily, until Eric was old enough to pull his own weight. Then he and Coach would head off for a few days -- occasionally a week during the summer -- while Suzanne stayed home tending the garden, lunching with church friends, and losing track of time down in her studio.

At some point during Eric’s teenage years, though, these father-son trips had become less frequent until they stopped altogether. Part of it was moving south to Madison, where they were further away from all their favorite hiking trails up in Chattahoochee. Coach’s job had also become more demanding once they were in Madison, while Eric’s summer break filled up with jobs, driver’s ed, studying for the SATs and ACTs, his baking, and his vlog.

They haven’t been on a camping trip since … the summer after Eric’s sophomore year in high school? He’s not yet awake enough to remember. He suddenly wonders if the camping equipment is still in the storage space over the garage, and whether Jack likes camping. Maybe during the week Jack is here they could drive up to Ellijay and spend a night up Bear Creek Trail.

His father’s in the kitchen packing a rucksack with water bottles and the usual trail mix, his favorite under-ripe bananas, a couple of apples.

“Coffee?” Eric asks, blearily.

“Already in the thermos. We’ll want to hit the road before the sun gets much higher. C’mon sport.”

“Right.” Eric snags a day-old muffin from the Tupperware on the counter and follows his father out to the drive, where Coach has already backed his truck out of the garage.

They listen to Morning Edition on their way out of town, Eric clutching the thermos of coffee between his knees and sucking down his first cup of coffee in semi-desperation while his father drives in a silence only occasionally broken by grunts of approval or disapproval at the morning news.

Eric’s acutely aware that this is the first time he and his father have been alone since That Night When Eric And Coach Came Out, and figures this is probably his moment to man up and ask his dad … any one of the dozens of questions he’s thought of lying awake in bed at 2am and 4am and 6am during the past ten days.

Coach beats him to it, though -- surprise number one for the morning.

He clears his throat as they pass the turnoff for Buckhead Road and asks, “So your team -- they treat you right son?”

“They do, sir.” Eric sucks at his coffee and smiles, thinking of Lardo and Shitty cuddling Jack on the couch up in Pawtucket.

“You’re … out to your teammates. Your teammates know you’re --?”

“Gay,” Eric supplies. “At least, I’m pretty sure. I’ve never felt about any girl the way I feel about Jack.”

His father nods, still staring at the road. Eric sees out of the corner of his eye the way his father flexes his hands on the steering wheel as if he’s conscious of gripping the wheel too hard and is trying to loosen his grip.

“Gay then,” Coach says. “Your teammates know you’re gay.”

“They do, yeah. Shitty was actually the first person I told -- back in the fall of my freshman year. It was --” Eric snorts to himself, remembering the stack of index cards and the way his hands had been shaking. How Shitty’s calm acceptance had made him feel both weepy and elated with relief. “He was the first person I’d _ever_ told. The first time I'd said it aloud, even to myself. It was good.”

“And they -- there haven’t been any incidents?”

Eric realizes what his father is driving at, “No - no, sir. Everyone on the team -- they’re good. Samwell doesn’t tolerate -- we all go through the trainings and everything. And the coaches hold us to it. And even the guys who might be a little ‘no homo’ about things, they never -- it’s so much different than here. It really is.” He hears himself reassuring his father and wonders when this conversation had become about his _father’s_ anxiety.

“I’m sorry,” Coach says, so quietly Eric almost misses it under the burble of the radio.

“What?” he asks, leaning lightly to the left to hear better.

“I’m sorry,” Coach repeats, more clearly this time as he reaches over to switch off the stereo. “Your mother and I -- I’m sorry we didn’t -- we should have done more.”

Eric sits with that for a few miles of winding back-country road. His parents don’t even know all the details of the bullying he lived through in middle and high school. Getting locked in the utility closet was impossible to hide, and he’d told enough in front of the principal and vice-principal, the school counselors, football coaches, and his parents to ensure the ringleaders were punished. But he’d been humiliated, ashamed of the way his fear kept him from returning to school, and -- once they moved to Madison -- terrified that history would repeat itself if he didn’t keep his head down and absorb whatever it was the bullies in his new school chose to dish out. Which had mostly been verbal harassment, physical intimidation, petty tripping and shoving. Things had never escalated like they had back in Gainesville.

Eric wonders now whether silence had been the best solution. Maybe if he’d told his parents about the ongoing harassment earlier they would have realized -- everything would have come out into the open a bit sooner. He’d always thought his father would be ashamed of a sissy son who couldn’t give as good as he got. But he’s starting to think he’s misjudged his father in more ways than one.

Eric sighs. “I know you and Mama tried -- you even changed jobs to get me out of Gainesville. That’s not nothing Dad. I didn’t ever think you wished me harm … I just. It would’ve been nice to know a little sooner that me being gay wasn’t gonna throw you for a loop, you know?”  _It would have been nice to know I wasn't alone in this,_ he thinks, but doesn't quite have the guts to say.

They pull into the parking area at the trail head and Coach kills the engine on the truck. They sit in silence, looking out into the thick wooded hillside beyond the gravel lot. There are only two other vehicles in the parking area on this weekday and the air is broken only by the cooling down of the truck engine and the songbirds wrapping up their early morning songs.

“I am sorry,” Eric’s father says again, to his hands at rest on the steering wheel. “I don’t -- talk about this much. At all.” He clears his throat and Eric looks at him sidelong, trying to read Coach’s expression. He looks tired and for the first time Eric thinks, startled, a little bit old.

He looks at his dad and thinks of him, for the first time, not as Coach or as his father, but as someone who -- like Eric -- has spent a lot of time carefully hiding parts of who he is from the world.

“Mama said you had a boyfriend?” Eric asks, tentatively, trying to remember what he can of the conversation the night he told his parents about Jack.

“Alex,” Coach says. “Alex and I … we were together for a few months. He was much more involved in the gay scene in Durham than I was willing to be. By the end of my freshman year I knew I wasn’t going to go pro and that I’d end up working with kids. Either way ...” He shook his head. “Today -- today in some parts of the country school teachers can fight to keep their jobs even if they’re out. At the time, I knew my career would be dead before it began if I was known to be gay. And then I met your mother.”

“Mama isn’t …” Eric doesn’t know how to ask the question that makes him feel sick to think about, because even formulating the question makes him feel like a horrible human being for wondering if his parents’ marriage has been a sham all these years.

“Your mother and I love each other,” the firm conviction in Coach’s voice releases something in Eric’s chest that allows him to breathe a little easier. “I’m _bisexual_ , Dickey. I know that’s still an unpopular thing for a man to be, but it’s what I’ve always been. I dated girls in high school, was hopelessly in love with my straight best friend, had a few relationships with men the first two years of college, and then -- I met your mother. Alex and I were still together through the end of sophomore year but he broke up with me over the summer. And when your mother and I ended up in the same class in the fall, we started hanging out more and -- that was it. For both of us. It still is.”

“Okay,” Eric says. “Okay, good.” He’s more relieved than he even expected to be that his parents are happy together. It’s been haunting him since that night, the chance however minuscule his father married his mother to pass -- the idea makes his skin crawl.

“I’m damn proud of you, son,” his father says, after a handful of silent seconds passes between them -- slightly easier than any of the silences they’ve endured since the night they both came out.

“You’re -- what?” Eric’s thrown by this.

“I’m _proud_ of you,” Coach repeats. “I feel -- it seems clear that your mother and I have not told you this often enough. You are -- I think about you coming out to a whole team of hockey players your freshman year of college, son, and I think about the _courage_ and _strength_ that took. It’s strength and courage I’ve never had. You were worried your mother and I would disapprove of the fact you were gay but you told us anyway. That's bravery.”

His hands spasm again on the steering wheel, clenching and releasing, and he sighs. Once again, Eric sees a new vulnerability, a new fragility in this big man he’s always felt slightly intimidated by. He’s always felt like his father _looms_ over him, slightly, both protective and also imposing. Someone whose stature Eric will never be able to live up to. But this morning he’s looking at his father, almost reluctantly, with a strange double vision. He’s seeing Coach, yes, but he’s also seeing Richard Sherman Bittle, the football player who’d never been able to say to his own parents, “Alex-and-I-are-dating.”

His intimidating father, Coach Bittle, thinks that he -- _Eric_ \-- is the one who’s got a backbone.

“I thought -- I thought --,” Eric starts, then stops again. “You were so disappointed when I wouldn’t play football! And the pies and Beyoncé and --I thought you were worried I’d turn out gay!”

“I wasn’t worried you’d turn out _gay_ \--” Coach snorts. “Hell, son, I was almost a professional football player and I turned out gay. One of the guys I was with my first year at UNC was a marine who ended up serving in Desert Storm. As far as I know he's still gay. I just never knew -- I’d look at you, kid, and see everything I love about your mother -- and I’m glad the two of you are close. You have her backbone and her kindness and generosity." He pauses. "I just sometimes wondered what I’d contributed amidst all that.”

Eric raises an eyebrow, tossing the last few drops of coffee out the window and screwing the thermos lid back in place. “So your son … who’s a gay athlete. You’re wondering what you could _possibly_ have contributed to my DNA.”

“It was the --” Coach waves a hand in the air, “-- it was the sequins and the --”

“Oh for the love of God, you’re never going to let me forget the sequins! It was _one_  outfit.” Eric rolls his eyes. And then they’re both chuckling, a little, as they climb out of the cab and stretch their cramped legs in preparation for climbing the first steep incline.

“One was more than enough, son.”

“You’re such a wuss,” Eric teases. “One of these days, we’re getting you on skates.”

“Mmm,” his father responds. “First, we’ve got this trail to hike before lunch.”

“You’re on.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Bear Creek Trail](http://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/conf/recreation/camping-cabins/recarea/?recid=10473&actid=34). Should Jack and Bitty go camping, Y/N?


	32. Thursday, 18 June 2015

Jack had fallen asleep early on Wednesday night since he’d known Bitty was going out with his friends from Camp to play pool again. Which is why he doesn’t hear about the shooting in South Carolina until the following morning when he wakes up and checks his phone to find a string of texts from Eric:

_I know you’re asleep but there’s been a shooting in Charleston_  
_It’s all over the televisions here_  
_They’ve turned up the sound and everyone in the bar is watching_

_It was at a church -- Emanuel AME_  
_All black folks_  
_God_

_They’re saying the shooter was a white guy_  
_Of course_  
_It always is_  
_Angry white guys with guns_

_What do you want to bet he was homophobic too?_

_Okay, we’re getting out of here_  
_Will doesn’t need to be watching this in a bar full of white folks_

_It’s just trauma porn right now_  
_Fucking television journalists_  
_Vultures_

_Okay I’m home_  
_Will’s safe at home with his family_

_God they’ll have to tell the kids at camp tomorrow_  
_What do you even say?_

_I know you’re asleep but_  
_I love you and I miss you_  


Jack’s radio alarm switches on while he’s scrolling through the texts and the reporter on NPR is live on the scene in Charleston, talking about the ongoing manhunt for the shooter. As Bitty had said, the suspect was described as a young white man who had attended the Wednesday evening Bible study and then shot and killed nine of the attendees -- including the church pastor -- before fleeing the scene.

Jack switches off the radio as they start talking to the victim’s families because it’s all too raw and intrusive feeling.  
He thumbs a response to Bitty:

_They’re talking about the shooting on NPR this morning._  
_Shooter’s still at large._  
_I’m glad you got Will home okay._  
  
_I have to get to practice but let me know when you’re awake._  
_I’ll call._  
_I miss you and I love you._

Then he rolls out of bed and heads to the bathroom to brush his teeth before heading for the rink.

* * *

When he walks into the dressing room, it’s immediately clear that everyone’s heard or seen the news.

“--don’t understand the relationship you Americans have to guns,” Chris Roberts is saying, clearly mid-rant. He and Dan Currie -- who’s at the locker next to Chris pulling on his under-armor -- are both from Toronto, recruited together from the Marlies before last year’s season. Jack’s spent just enough time around them to wonder what’s going on between them, but doesn’t feel it’s his place to ask. Like Ransom and Holster, Currie and Roberts seem perfectly aware and completely at ease with the fact that everyone -- from their teammates to their fans to the reporters at ESPN -- assumes they’re fucking. But they’re comfortable letting it stay in the realm of unconfirmed rumor and fanfiction.

Jack wishes he had their equanimity.

“Just imagine, okay? Just imagine this motherfucker had a knife or even a hunting rifle instead of a Glock. How many people could he have stabbed fatally before being tackled, right? And don’t fucking try to tell me ‘if only the pastor had had a gun’.”

“I told you to stop arguing with those crazies on Twitter, man,” Dan says, like this is an old argument.

“Hey, I can’t help it if they show up in my mentions. I’m not going to let that shit stand.”

“The block button is your friend man.”

“I gotta platform,” Chris insists, “We’ve got tens of thousands of followers and a P.R. team behind us, dude. I’m a white guy with a big mouth. If I’m not the one to call it like I see it, who is?”

“I get it but -- I just think we can do something less fruitless than argue with racists on social media,” Dan sighs.

“Hey, everyone, listen up!” Georgia comes in through the locker room door with a giant iced coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts in her hand. “I know most, if not all of you, have already heard about the shooting at Emanuel AME down in Charleston, South Carolina last night. What you may not all be aware of is the fact that Jersey has family down in Charleston and relatives who belong to the Emanuel congregation. Now everyone in his family is safe, but he’s flown down --” she checks her watch “-- is flying down, rather, to be with them for the next few days. You’ll see we’ve already a brief statement up on our website expressing our condolences to the families of the victims and condemning the actions of the shooter.”

She pauses, looking around at the dozen or so guys who are in the process of dressing for their morning skate. “Two things. First, we’ll be having a team meeting at 10:00 this morning for anyone who’s available and wants to help us think about an appropriate response. Your input is always welcome. Second, the temperature on social media this morning is -- predictably -- high and will only get higher. While your social media accounts are your own, I remind you all to please keep it civil. Have strong opinions, argue with assholes if that’s what you want to do with your time, but please do it in a way that makes less work for my team not more. Got it?”

There’s a mumble of agreement from the players as Georgia takes a ship of coffee and gives a couple specific people -- Chris included -- rather pointed looks.

“Yes Ma’am,” someone says from behind Jack, causing a smattering of laughter around the room.

Georgia snorts. “Good. See you at 10:00. Have a good skate, everyone.”

Jack watches her walk out of the locker room and thinks again how lucky he is to have landed here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In constructing the breaking news references, I relied on the Wikipedia entry for the [Charlestown Church Shooting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charleston_church_shooting) so I apologize for any errors in re-creation. It's tricky writing this story in the context of such recent real-world events. I've never done that before with any of my stories so ... a new challenge.
> 
> In choosing Chris and Dan's former team, I went with the current minor league team in Toronto, again [according to Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ice_hockey_teams_in_Ontario#Current_teams_2).


	33. Friday, 19 June 2015

Eric drops Will at his parents’ house at the end of the night and sits in the truck watching until Will reaches the house and the porch light flips on as the motion detector trips. It’s nine o’clock and full dark is approaching. When Will gets the door open he turns to wave and Eric waves back, taking his foot off the brake and pulls away from the curb.

He’d noticed all the Confederate flags hanging out on peoples’ homes as he drove to work this morning, the Confederate flag stickers on the backs of passing cars, the Confederate flag t-shirt on the guy three people ahead of him in line at the coffee shop. Not that he ever stops seeing them when he’s home now, hyper aware of all the cultural differences between what would be socially acceptable in Massachusetts and what’s commonplace down here in Georgia. But this feels _different_  -- like people don’t even have the decency to recognize the link between the symbol of Southern identity they’re sporting and the nine black people dead in Charleston. Or like they get there’s a connection and they simply don’t care.

He’s newly aware, after yesterday, that this is the sort of hyper awareness that people like Will and his family are never without.

Eric drives home, flipping his finger at the house three doors down from his parents’ with a flag flying, and pulls the truck into the garage. He kills the engine and enters the house quietly in case his parents are already asleep, swinging by the kitchen to pick up his customary dinner plate and heading straight for his bedroom. He just needs to close himself away from the here-and-now for a bit and spend some time talking to Jack.

He leaves the plate in his room and rinses the smell of food and bleach from his skin in the shower before pulling on a clean pair of boxers to sleep in. He reaches for a t-shirt, then hesitates because the heat of the day still lingers even with the fan in his window pulling in night air.

And it’s not like Jack hasn’t seen him shirtless before.

He smiles to himself and opens up his laptop, letting it wake up while he unwraps his dinner and considers taking the enchiladas downstairs to rewarm. But he’s not motivated enough to go all the way back down to the kitchen so he just sticks his fork into the lukewarm meal and takes a bite. _Mmm._ His mother’s used the cream cheese again. _Best. Decision. Ever._

Skype wakes up with his laptop, which hasn’t open since he said goodbye to Jack the night before, and Jack is on waiting for his call.

“Hey,” he says, when Eric calls him up, his voice coming through a half-second before the screen syncs and Jack’s tired face is there smiling softly at him. He sees Jack’s eyes flicker down to his chest and back up to his face, taking note of Eric’s shirtless state.

“Hey,” Eric says, around his mouth full of enchilada.

“You just get home?”

“Yeah, I drove Will home so his sister didn’t have to come out and pick him up. Her parents were nervous about her being out on the roads tonight.”

“Bad weather?”

“We had a thunderstorm earlier -- but no, I meant everything being a little tense what with the shooting and the media coverage.”

“Oh. Right.” Jack sighs and rubs his face. “Jersey’s still down there. I guess it’s a media circus down there, and everyone’s still in shock.”

“Can we - can we not talk about this anymore tonight?” Eric asks, hearing the pleading note in his own voice. “I know that’s white privilege talking but -- we’ve spent the whole day up at Oconee reassuring little kids that a gunman isn’t going to open fire on them. I just … talk to me about Pawtucket. Tell me what we’ll do when I come visit in August. I want to not think about the South for awhile.”

“Mmm.” Jack settles back against the pillows he has propped against his headboard and adjust the screen of his laptop to make sure Eric can see his face. “Well, we’ll start every morning with a jog down Blackstone Boulevard and through Swan Point Cemetery -- have I told you it’s one of the oldest landscaped cemeteries in New England?”

Eric smiles. “A few times.”

“And then I thought we should probably check out your competition. There’s a place just up the road called Wildflour, though they only do Vegan, and a place called Seven Stars? And Zaccagini’s Pastry Shoppe -- they do pies.”

“Jack -- have you been _Googling_ my competition?” Eric is both touched and amused by the image of Jack hunched over his computer taking note of places where Eric can critique the local pie options.

Jack shrugs. “A couple of the guys on the team are foodies -- they talk and I listen.”

“So what you’re telling me is I can bribe my way into their good graces with cookies and pie.”

“Dev and Pogs, at least. Dev does homebrew in his basement. And Pogs goes over to help him taste-test.”

Eric scrapes the last of his dinner off the plate and drags his laptop into bed without bothering to brush his teeth. One night isn’t going to do serious damage, and he doesn’t want to interrupt Jack’s storytelling.

“So tell me about the guys -- I wanna know who I’m meeting in August.”

“I’ve told you most of what I know.”

“Well, tell me again, honey. I like a good bedtime story.” Eric yawns and Jack laughs.

“Get comfortable then, and I’ll bore you to sleep with the few details I have so far gathered about the other guys on the team.”

“Yes please.”

“I haven’t met all of them yet because some of the guys are on vacation -- visiting family, taking kids to Disney World, that sort of thing. Jersey’s down in Charleston right now, where his family lives, His grandparents and an aunt and uncle, I guess, attend Emanuel. So he’s been down there doing what he can.”

“Mm,” Eric murmurs in agreement. “Jersey?”

“His name is Adrian Michaelson, but he grew up somewhere outside of Princeton. So 'Jersey.'"

“And there’s Chris and Dan,” Eric prompts. “Are you any closer to figuring out which team they’re on?”

Jack laughs, “Apart from the Falconers you mean? I told you my gaydar has always been shit.”

“You should complain to the management.”

“Mmm. It’s true. Can’t be playing with faulty equipment.”

“Maybe one of the team managers can hook you up with a newer model?”

“I’ll put in the request.” Jack smiles, “I mean, not that it’s any of my business whether they are or they aren’t. They don’t seem to care what people think one way or the other.” Eric notes the wistful tone in Jack’s voice.

“Well, but -- it would be nice if you knew you weren’t the _only_ gay guy on the team, right?”

Jack shrugs. “I usually assume I’m not the _only_ one. I mean -- on every team I’ve played there’s been at least one... “ he raises an eyebrow pointedly at Eric.

Eric laughs, “Yeah, well. Who wouldn’t turn gay for you Jack.”

He means it as a joke but Jack responds seriously: “Plenty of people, including my ex.”

“Oh, sweetheart, I didn’t mean --” Eric’s struggling to stay awake.

Jack waves away the apology. “Kent had his chance. He decided I wasn’t worth the risk. I’m glad you do.”

“Me too, Jack. It’s a lot --”

“Worth it,” Jack says firmly, making Eric smile even as his eyes drift shut.

“Yeah, totally worth it,” Eric says in response.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I completely crashed last night as I was posting this and didn't have it in me to post "show notes" ... so here I am adding them this morning:
> 
>  
> 
> [Wildflour Vegan Bakery](http://sevenstarsbakery.com/)
> 
>  
> 
> [Seven Stars Bakery](http://sevenstarsbakery.com/)
> 
>  
> 
> [Zaccagini's Pastry Shoppe](http://zaccspastry.com/)


	34. Saturday, 20 June 2015

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which I indulge in the pleasure of making Jack do the things I enjoy doing in Boston.

Jack wakes up on Saturday morning to the alarming realization that he has no plans for the weekend ahead. He rolls over and stares blankly at the ceiling, Monsieur Éléphant trapped dolefully against his right ear.

His first weekend in Pawtucket had been filled with setting up his apartment and saying goodbye to his parents. His second weekend had been pure exhaustion from his first week with the new team. His third weekend had been brimming with the light and energy that were Shitty and Lardo. Next Saturday, he has plans to drive out to the Cape to see his uncles but this weekend is … empty. He doesn’t even have the kids to work with this morning because now that school is out for the summer the Saturday-morning open skate will be on hiatus until after Labor Day.

He’d negotiated to start his contract June 1st because he didn’t want the months after graduation to buckle under the weight of future expectations. He knows from experience that’s a recipe for disaster -- he’d rather just get on with it. But that decision has its own set of consequences, including the fact that during the off-season the majority of his new teammates aren’t around all that much. He’s been going to skate every morning and do his cardio and strength training at the team’s in-house gym and while there’s usually a handful of guys there every day, he’s the only one who’s _there every day_ and they’re starting to look at him funny. Even the few guys who’ve stayed in town after Memorial Day will start to drift off -- Dan and Chris will head back to Toronto to spend six weeks or so with their families; Pogs has plans to hike a section of the Appalachian Trail with Bean; Dev is headed off to something that’s actually called “beer school” somewhere in the north of England.

In short, Jack has more free time to do as he pleases since he could count his age in single digits. And he no longer has any idea how he used to cope.

He reaches for his phone and checks for messages, but nothing to give shape to his day has come in over the nighttime hours. Bitty must still be asleep, which given the time -- only 6:13 -- isn’t surprising.

So he’ll go for a run, and shower, and then …

Jack remembers, suddenly, that Lardo and Shitty had enthused about the Hokusai exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts the weekend before. He hasn’t been to the MFA since his art history class took a field trip there during his first semester at Samwell. Going to museums is a thing that adults do, right? And he realizes that he doesn’t need the excuse of other people’s plans -- he can actually make the decision to go somewhere on his own.

He’ll take a book in case things get awkward.

* * *

Jack decides while he’s in the shower to take the commuter rail into Boston, in part because he rarely got to take the train while he was at Samwell. His therapist is up in Boston, within shouting distance of Back Bay Station, but it takes as long to drive from Samwell to the closest station as it does to drive or take the Samwell shuttle into the city so Jack had never had an excuse to ride the train. He parks his car at the South Attelboro station, one of a dozen or so vehicles clustered near the platform. He’s made it in time for the 8:35 train. He’s dressed in jeans and a Cape Playhouse t-shirt from 2013, hoping the scruffy messenger bag and the fact that he’s wearing his prescription glasses and not his contacts will stop most random hockey fans from realizing who he is. The glasses usually work because Bob has always had 20/20 vision and the thin wire frames of Jack’s glasses blur the shape of his cheekbones and brow just enough to throw people off the scent.

Settling into an empty row on the train as it picks up speed out of the station, Jack fishes his phone out of his bag and texts Bitty:

_Going into Boston today._  
_Where should I eat lunch?_

He checks his email while he has the phone on -- there’s a message from his mother and the rest is all junk -- but no response from Bitty is forthcoming which probably means he’s still asleep. Unless he’s asleep, driving, or at Camp working in the kitchen, Bitty typically responds to texts from Jack in less than thirty seconds. If Jack hadn’t witnessed Bitty in action, he would have sworn there was no way Eric ever did anything except stare at his device waiting for Jack to send him a message.

He tucks his phone back into his bag, next to his camera, and pulls out the book on Frederick Law Olmsted he checked out from the library earlier in the week. He’d picked it up because he knew Olmsted had designed the park behind his parents’ house in Montréa,l and discovered reading the flap copy that he’d also done a lot of work in Boston. Maybe that's part of why Jack has always felt comfortable in the city.

In an hour the train is pulling into Ruggles. Jack exits the station and walks down through the quiet Northeastern campus to Huntington Avenue, then crosses to the Museum of Fine Arts side. He’s still has a quarter of an hour before the museum opens for the day, so he walks around to the north entrance and takes pictures of the freaky baby heads because he knows that Ransom and Holster will enjoy being creeped out by them. Then he follows a herd of geese across The Fenway and wanders toward the playing field where a knot of people are out running their dogs and over to the right, on the green by the pond, a group of seniors are doing exercises.

Jack checks his phone again and finally finds a string of texts from Eric who’s woken up a few minutes before.

 _What are you doing in Boston?_  
_Are you seeing Lardo and Shitty?_  
_What neighborhood will you be in -- OMG have you ever been to Flour??_  
_Shitty and Chowder and I stopped there once after a movie_  
_AMAZING_  
  
_And if you miss the lattes from Annie’s?_  
_Pavement Coffee_  
_When I was there in May they were doing this thing called a Death Cream_  
_Or, also, the Iced Mint Latte_  
_It’s hidden on their seasonal menu, just ask for it._  


Jack smiles and texts back:

_I’m going to an exhibit at the MFA._  
_I realized I had a free day and thought why not?_  
_Lardo and Shitty said the Hokusai exhibit is good._  
_It was kind of an impulsive trip so I’m here on my own._  
_It’s nice._  
_I haven’t spoken to anyone all day!_  
_:-O_

Eric responds:

It’s just after 10:00 so Jack makes his way back to the museum and stands in line to pay for his ticket, then checks his shoulder bag and makes his way through the winding hallway to the inner courtyard where the stairs descend to the special exhibition galleries.

It’s peaceful inside the dim galleries, where the prints and paintings are lit by pools of specially-calibrated light.

There are benches arranged at the center of several galleries, and after he’s drunk his fill of the vast landscapes -- simultaneously wildly vicious and deeply calming -- Jack sits next to an elderly man who’s dozing off over his cane and watches a group of teenagers titter over the pornographic volumes tucked away in a corner case. Museums are a good place for anonymous people-watching, Jack realizes, because most visitors are here to see what’s on the walls and in the cases rather than one another. He watches couples old and young wander by hand in hand, parents herding their offspring didactically, tour groups led by crisp museum docents, a few people, like himself, who appear to have come on their own.

Jack and his mother used to visit museums a lot, when he was a kid and the three of them -- Jack and his parents -- traveled more than they were home. Alicia and Bob had always felt that staying together as a family was a priority, and they had the money so where Bob traveled Alicia and Jack followed. He’s been to every city in North America where NHL hockey games are played and more than two dozen foreign countries on four separate continents. And rather than hiring tutors, Alicia had taken Jack out exploring wherever they landed. Museums and libraries, she’d argued, were as useful to a curious child as textbooks and classrooms. Jack had a library card as soon as he could sign his name. It was from his mother that he’d learned to always carry a book when traveling. “Rude men will rarely question your decision to dine alone if you have your nose in an inscrutable book,” Alicia had claimed. Over the years, Jack’s been witness to a few men whose entitlement or obliviousness has transcended this rule of thumb, but in general can testify to its effect: Whether she’s sitting at a cafe in Paris or a sports bar in Boulder, Alicia’s reading choices can repel 98% of all unwanted overtures.

Jack pulls out his phone, again, and takes a selfie for Bitty next to one of his favorite paintings. The light is a little dim, but Eric still texts back:

Jack writes:

_So tell me where the closest place for one of those mint lattes is?_

He’ll go sit in a coffee shop somewhere with his nose in a book and enjoy peace among strangers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Beer Schools](https://www.craftbeer.com/beer-studies/beer-schools). The one I sent Dev to is in Sunderland.
> 
> The [Hokusai exhibition at the MFA](http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/hokusai) was AMAZING.
> 
> I also think Jack would love [this exhibition](http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/unfinished-stories) and I will head!canon him and Bitty making a return visit later in the year.
> 
> The book Jack is reading on the train is [A Clearing in the Distance](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/344846.A_Clearing_in_the_Distance) by Witold Rybczynski and is really, really good if you're the sort of person who nerds out about urban and landscape history (kof).
> 
> Google “giant baby heads mfa” but don't say I didn't warn you. THEY ARE NOT OKAY. MOST NOT-OKAY PUBLIC ART IN BOSTON.
> 
> There is a [Flour](http://www.flourbakery.com/) right near Jack's therapist's office at Back Bay Station.
> 
> And [Pavement Coffee](http://pavementcoffeehouse.com/) makes delicious lattes; I am a big fan of the Iced Mint Latte which my barista informed me the other day has fallen out of favor this year (!!!). Tragic. BITTY WOULD AGREE WITH ME.


	35. Sunday, 21 June 2015

Now that school is out, the Methodist church has switched to their usual summertime schedule of a single 10:00am service instead of two services with a Sunday school hour between. Following the service there’s a social hour with a simple soup lunch that on special occasions -- such as a baptismal Sunday -- turn into more elaborate potluck affairs. Which is why Suzanne and Eric are awake before seven, mincing hazelnuts and rolling out pie crust for the mini maple butter tarts that Suzanne has decided to take for the Harlan, De Haan, and Wade babies’ christenings.

Eric’s handling the sour cream pastry crust because he’s always had more patience than his mother when it comes to pie crust. He’s filling the tartlet pans with pastry in preparation for flash-refrigeration when his mother starts the conversation.

“I’m glad you and your father had a good talk on Wednesday,” she says, glancing over from where she’s scraping that latest batch of nuts into the bowl.

Eric considers his options for answering and settles for, “Did you put him up to it?” Which might be a little harsh, but he’s only on his first cup of coffee and he’ll be on his feet for another twelve hours today.

Suzanne sighs, “Honey, you give your father too little credit.”

“He couldn’t find a _single opening_ in the past ten years to tell me he was bi? You couldn’t find a way to tell me? Even when you knew about the bullies at school? Even when we sat in Sunday school listening to endless ‘debate’ and ‘dialogue’ about whether homosexual sex is sick or sinful?”

“Your father and I have always spoken up against --”

Eric makes a frustrated sound in the back of his throat, “Mama, don’t you get that there’s a difference between saying, ‘Oh, gay people are just as Godly as us,’ and saying, ‘I’m married to one of the men whose relative humanity you’re sitting here debating’?”

“Dicky, you _know_ we couldn’t do that. There are at least five members of the school board at church, and anyway people talk. He’d have lost his job before the next Sunday came around.”

“I know -- _I know_ \-- I just -- _errgh_ ,” Eric yanks open the refrigerator door. “I understand why you didn’t say anything publicly. Lord, Mama. A part of me still wants to tell Jack we’re never _ever_ talking to the press because I’ve seen what they say about gay athletes and it terrifies me. So I understand that. I do. What I _don’t_ understand is why you never told _me_.”

Suzanne scrapes another batch of nuts into the bowl and starts again with a new handful.

“We should have found a way, Dicky, I’m sorry,” she says, finally, setting down her knife and wiping her hands on the towel she has tossed over her shoulder. “It’s just not something either of us have ever had much practice speaking about and -- it’s not the sort of thing you imagine sharing with your child.”

Eric starts rolling out another ball of dough. “You didn’t seem to have trouble telling stories about how you and Coach used to sneak around behind MeeMaw and PopPop. Or showing me the pictures from your senior prom.”

His mother is quiet for a moment and finally says, “You’re right. I know you’re right. I can see it all now, plain as day Dicky. When I've looked back these past two weeks -- but I was so determined not to repeat my mother’s mistakes that I didn’t see the ones we were making. And I’m sorry, honey, truly sorry.”

“What mistakes? I mean -- what mistakes of MeeMaw’s?” Eric asks, out of curiosity.

Suzanne laughs, ruefully, “You’ve heard MeeMaw at family dinners -- ‘Now Charlene, are you still with that nice young man from Savannah?’ -- ‘Tell me, Georgie, have you asked that girl of yours to the movies?’ -- ‘Now look at little Rosie, won’t she grow up to be a fine catch for some young man?’ ” Suzanne’s voice slides into the rhythm of her mother’s chitchat effortlessly. “From the time I was a little girl, I had my mother and her circle of friends planning my future for me -- the pastor’s daughter growing up to be the pastor’s wife. The most radical thing they considered for me was a college degree so I could teach or do missionary work before settling down to have babies and help my future husband run the church.”

Eric works by rote cutting out the circles of pastry dough and fitting them into the tart pans while his mother talks. He’s not sure how this is a response to his question, but he figures he can at least hold his tongue until she’s told her story in full.

“I picked an out-of-state school and I picked studio art because I’d found a book about Judy Chicago in one of the used bookstores near campus halfway through my first semester and decided I’d reject God the father and find the sacred feminine through art. And then I met your father, who’s taught me more than any of the theorists I read what it means to not put people in tidy little boxes according to gender. I know you might find this hard to believe, honey, but your father is the one who helped me not be anxious when it turned out all you wanted to do as a little boy was follow me around the kitchen and begged me to let you take ballet. I was trying to give you … room to learn who you were without assuming like my mother always had. I realize now that silence -- we should have realized, your father and I, that a child fills his parents’ silences with ideas he hears from other people. But that was never my intention, Dicky. I just didn’t want our expectations weighing you down.”

Eric slides the last tray of tarts into the refrigerator and washes his hands at the sink. He’s still trying to wrap his head around these new versions of his parents. He’s only ever known his mother’s work as the assemblages she now makes -- the refurbished antiques with delicately painted scenes: botanicals, the commissioned portraits of family pets, intricate patterns inspired by quilting designs. The lacquered postcards, anonymous snapshots, advertisements, and other ephemera. He has a sudden vision of Lardo and his mother at the next parents’ weekend chatting about the tired symbology of menstrual art. It’s enough to give him a split-second headache.

When his mother explains herself like this, it all seems so obvious why his parents made the decisions they did. And he feels like kind of a dick for holding onto the way he was hurt by the end result -- all those years feeling sure he was a disappointment to his father. All those years wondering if his parents were the sort of liberals who would support gay people in the abstract, but when push came to shove would rather not have one _in the family_ thank you very much.

He takes a deep breath. “I’m -- I’m thinking about not coming home next summer,” is what comes out of his mouth. And when he says it out loud something loosens in his chest. So he tries it again. “I mean -- I’d visit you and Coach. Or maybe you could come visit me? But I think -- I think I need to be away from here, for awhile.” _Maybe forever._

Right now, he cannot picture living anywhere in Georgia, even Atlanta, as an openly gay man. He knows people do it, but something dies inside him every time he imagines the possibility. Of having to feel the glares and hear the muttering disapproval. Not to mention the simple fact that if he and Jack stay together -- and Eric refuses to imagine a future in which Jack _isn’t_ his -- they would be legal strangers to one another in his home state, while in all of Canada, in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, they could decide to get married like Georgia and her wife. Or Jack’s uncles.

Eric is just starting to picture a future in New England as one half of a couple. He’s been able to gingerly imagine holding hands with Jack in public, kissing him goodbye at the front door of a shared apartment, sitting in the family section at a Falconers’ game. All without worrying about being beat up in a dark alley later that night.

Down here in the South, his future just feels like one long march of endless solitude and silence.

“Oh, Dicky, sweetheart,” Suzanne says, “I want you to be _happy_. And safe. I’ve always known that maybe -- maybe that won’t be possible down here in Georgia.” She sounds sad, but unsurprised by the thought. “I’m a Southern girl born and bred, but you --” she comes over and places a small hand against his cheek, “--you aren’t bound by the life your parents have chosen, Dicky. Any more than I was bound by the life my parents lived. The only thing -- the only thing I ask -- and your father would agree with me -- the only thing I ask is that you stay in school until you’re through. That boy of yours, I can see the generosity in his eyes, and his parents are good people. It could be a temptation to --”

“I won’t quit, Mama,” Eric is relieved that this is a request he can happily grant. “I’m excited about going back to school next year -- and I couldn’t let the team down like that, anyway! And Jack’s right down the road -- closer than driving up to Atlanta! I was just thinking that maybe next summer -- I like my friends at Camp but it doesn’t pay so good. And there’s probably people I could learn from up in Massachusetts. I thought maybe -- a bakery or a food truck or -- well, anyway, _something_. I was gonna talk to my adviser about internships, maybe a summer research project.”

His mother nods, firmly, in approval and returns to the mixing bowl where she dips a pinkie finger into the maple-currant-hazelnut mix and then reaches for the cardamom to add a pinch more. “That’s my boy. Your father and I will hold you to it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Eric smiles with relief and throws her a mock salute before reaching to set the oven 350℉. The future is starting to unfurl gently before him, and Eric feels better and better about the possibilities he sees there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to noadventureshere for the suggestion of hazelnuts instead of walnuts and a hint of cardamom to make this Sylvie’s special recipe :-)!
> 
> For those who missed it from the earlier chapter, the base recipe would be [this one](http://www.canadianliving.com/food/baking_and_desserts/best_maple_butter_tarts.php).


	36. Monday, 22 June 2015

Jack wakes to pre-dawn light filtering into his bedroom from over the three-quarter wall that separates the sleeping area from his living room. He’s been dreaming about checking practice in Faber, with Bitty, of skating with him in lazy circles on the otherwise-empty rink. About the sensation of picking up speed and gaining on Bitty as he flies across the ice, letting the momentum of his body weight carry him and Eric together into the boards.

In the dream, they aren’t wearing helmets, or any of the usual bulky gear, and part of Jack knows this is okay because it’s a dream so no one can get hurt. Which means when he skates into Bitty and pushes him to the edge of the ice he has Bitty trapped warm and breathless against his chest, can bracket Eric’s head and shoulders with his forearms, can lean in for a kiss … and then, in that way that dreams have of blending and bleeding and shifting like a Dali painting, they’re on the ice but not on the ice. They’re up against the boards kissing, limbs entangled, Eric lifting himself up with his arms wrapped around Jack’s neck … and then everything shifts again and he’s actually laying on the ice … only the ice is also his bedroom, his old bedroom in the Haus, and Bitty is warm, warmer, hot, naked skin against Jack’s also-naked skin and their making out still wrapped around each other, Eric’s mouth all over Jack’s skin, teeth sharp against his collarbone, dragging lower, his whole body dragging down and across Jack’s until --

\-- but of course Jack wakes up, heart racing, chest heaving. He’s gotten tangled in his duvet at some point in the night so that his front is overheated and his naked ass is cold where the circulating air from the fan he left running is blowing over exposed skin.

And he’s hard. Achingly so.

Which is … unusual. For Jack. Not, he’s given to understand, for many guys his age. God knows, you live in a hockey house for three years and you learn more than you ever wanted to about the erections of men with whom you have no plans to become sexually intimate.

But unusual for Jack. Jack is not accustomed to waking up a hairsbreadth from orgasm. Jack’s barely had a chance in the last twelve years to get to know his own unadulterated libido. There were the anti-anxiety meds, the anti-anti-anxiety meds, the better anti-anxiety meds, finally followed by a tapering off to the smallest possible dosage that kept his brain from convincing him none of the things he actually likes doing are worth the effort. He’s been on the same dose for a little over two years now but by the time he’d taken a breath and looked around it felt like everyone -- _Crisse, even the first-years who get younger every year_ \-- had long ago worked the sex thing out.

How do you tell a guy -- probably several years your junior, whose sexual history is probably exponentially more extensive than yours -- that you got off a handful of times with your best friend but never actually talked about it? That you spent years ignoring everything your stupid body thought it wanted because that had taken you to dangerous, life-threatening places and safety was in following the rules other people gave you to follow? That the only place your body has felt right in recent years has been on the ice?

He hadn’t known how to have that conversation, and wasn’t willing to let alcohol do the talking for him, so there it was.  
  
And here’s the thing … he hasn’t felt like this since _before_. Since before the overdose. He’d forgotten what this feels like, the sudden prickly awareness of arousal, the desperate neediness of desire that floods into his body without being coaxed out of hiding. Eric might as well be here in the room with the weight of wanting that’s keeping Jack’s heart rate elevated, pooling sweat along his breastbone, tightening his pelvic muscles in ways that make him turn his face deeper into the pillow pressed under his cheek.

He bites his lip, hard, and fumbles with the tangle of sheets and feathers until his left hand connects with the flesh of his belly, the rough curls damp with sweat that curl below his navel. his dick, like his dream-addled mind, is still more than half-convinced that Eric is pressed up against his front, that Eric will be sliding slicked-up fingers down and around his balls, pressing _in_.

Jack hasn’t thought a lot about what he might like beyond _Eric_ and what he’s learned from his own touch to be reliably good. But this newly-active part of his brain is apparently trying to make up for lost time by invading his dreams and suggesting activities and positions he’s only ever seen performed with dubious veracity at Haus porn viewing parties. He kind of hates Holster and Ransom right now for the fact he even has these scenarios in his head _at all_ except that some of it is clearly speaking to him because here he is barely awake and jerking off to the thought of Bitty’s fingers inside him, of Bitty telling him _so good you’re so good_ and _you’re gonna come for me, sweetheart, don’t fight it, so good_ \--

Jack feels the orgasm gather seconds before it slams through him, arching his spine from his scalp to the curl of his toes as he comes in a hot, sticky mess against his hand and into the knot of bed sheets still tangled around his torso.

He drifts for a few minutes, maybe more, after that, because the next thing he knows he’s still sticky and tangled in the bedclothes and the radio has clicked on to let him know that it’s six o’clock. His lips are dry, and slightly sore from where he was biting them.

_“...by the way, the Confederate flag is still flying at full-staff outside the capitol at Columbia, while the U.S. flag and the state flag are at half-staff. And that’s because that is the law in South Carolina…”_

One of the NPR reporters is talking about Charleston again, and Jack wonders how Jersey and his family are doing. Maybe if he followed the guys on Facebook or Twitter he’d know. He considers asking Bitty is he follows any of the Falconers on social media, then files this away for later in the summer. Now it’s Monday, and his weekly schedule is back in gear which means -- has meant, the past few weeks -- hitting the ice at the Falconers’ complex and then the gym, followed by breakfast and anything else he’s expected to show up for. But today, he thinks, maybe he’ll just go for a run instead, eat breakfast at home. Maybe he’ll try making waffles.

He pushes himself up to his elbows and then swings his legs over the edge of the bed. Waffles. Waffles and laundry. And then maybe he’ll see about unpacking some of his photography books and hanging a few pictures on the still-bare living room walls. Maybe Eric can Skype in and help him decide what will look best.

He thinks again about Bitty warm and pliant against his chest, and feels the flush roll across his skin. Ten more days. Ten more days, and he’ll be off to Logan for the Atlanta-bound flight and Bitty will be waiting for him at the other end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to the brilliant work of NPR's archivists, I was actually able to find the stories Morning Edition ran for [22 June 2015. The article quoted in the chapter is ](http://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/2015/06/22/416388864)[Confederate Flag Controversy Raised Again After S.C. Shooting](http://www.npr.org/2015/06/22/416389987/confederate-flag-controversy-raised-again-after-s-c-church-shooting).


	37. Tuesday, 23 June 2015

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter tonight since I finally finished the three-week seminar I was co-leading and our farewell celebration ran late. But plus side is now I'm done with evening work obligations for the summer!

“Hey, Mama?” Eric calls, picking his way down the basement steps into his mother’s workshop. Suzanne is sitting on her basket-weaving stool, surrounded by buckets of water-soaked reeds and caning, working on a commission -- hand-woven and hand-painted gift baskets for a wedding party of eight.

“Mmm?” She responds, looking up from her work while her hands keep on moving.

“I wanted to ask your help with something. It’s a present for Jack.” Eric finishes his descent and goes over to his mother’s worktable where he clears a small patch under one of Suzanne's swing arm lamps, setting the photograph of Frank and Vince down in its bright pool of light.

“What do you have there?” Suzanne sets the half-finished basket aside and wipes her hands on the backs of her jeans as she stands. She joins him at the table, leaning over to look at the photo he’s laid on the well-scarred wood. Eric resists the urge to snatch it up and tuck it back into the envelope where he’s been keeping it safe from harsh sunlight and prying eyes.

“Ooh, honey,” his mother coos the way she always does over a particularly good find, “aren’t they a find!”

“I was thinking to give it to Jack,” Eric says. “As a housewarming present. I found it out at the Pavilion. I was gonna buy it a frame but I’ve been thinking -- maybe I could do something a little different?”

“Did you have something particular in mind?” Suzanne picks the image up gingerly by the edges, turning the photo paper over to read the same penciled inscription Eric had sitting on his heels in the antique mall: _Frank and Vince - Otswego - 1923._

“That’s what I wanted to ask you,” Eric explains. “I thought maybe a chair? Or a stool?”

“Hmm.” Suzanne lays the photograph back down and steps back from it, considering. “You just have the one, right? You’ll want it to have pride of place whatever you put it on.” She’s frowning, not unhappily, just in that abstracted way she does when she’s considering. “I know! I have just the thing!”

She disappears into the back corner where she keeps the larger pieces of furniture waiting for design ideas to take shape or for the right commission to come along. Eric listens to her rummaging around over the quiet hum of the audiobook she’s been streaming from the computer at her desk.

When his mother returns, she’s carrying a small cabinet with a little screen door on the front, visibly in need of repair, and two shelves just visible through the cloudy, tearing mesh.

“It’s a pie safe!” she says, grinning, when she sets it down in front of Eric. “It’s an awkward size -- a little too small for a coffee or end table, a little too tall to work well on a countertop, but --”

Eric grins, “-- but I could actually use it for pies! Mama, you’re a genius!” He crouches down to open the little door. In addition to the screen, the rusty hinges need replacing and the entire piece desperately needs a paint job or a fresh coat of varnish, maybe two. But the wood is essentially sound and the joins still good.

“Now you have a couple of options,” Suzanne says, crouching down next to him so she can illustrate with her hands like she prefers to do, “You’ll need to strip this and refinish it -- the state of the underlying wood will probably determine whether you can varnish or need to stick with paint -- and either way you’ll probably be stuck leaving the interior painted, unless you want to take the whole thing apart and reassemble. Now, I was thinking you could reconstruct the door with the photograph here,” she places a palm on the upper pane of the screen door, where the wire is starting to tear away from the frame. “But you could also choose to put it on the top.”

“I like the door idea,” Eric nods. He’s seen enough of Jack’s apartment over Skype, now, and the random snapshots Jack has a habit of sending throughout the day, that he has some ideas of where the pie safe might go. He can picture how the photograph, if they lacquer it to the top, would just end up under a stack of cookbooks. “So I need to start by stripping it--?” He still has an hour or two before he’ll need to ready himself to leave for work.

“Here, that’s best done outside. Let me help you take it out to the back patio…” Suzanne nudges him out of the way and together they pick up the pie safe and start maneuvering it out of the basement. As they wrestle the piece out of the basement, Eric thinks about sending a photo of it to Jack and then smiles to himself, deciding it will be more fun to make the gift a genuine surprise. One he knows Jack will love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The pie safe I have in mind would be [something like this](http://galleryplus.ebayimg.com/ws/web/311606715581_1_0_1.jpg), only slightly less spindly looking.
> 
> Several of you have left very apologetic notes pointing out typos and other issues with recent chapters. NO NEED TO APOLOGIZE you delightfully polite people! I write these chapters between ~8-11pm and post them before falling asleep. I typically go back over breakfast the following day and catch all the issues I missed the night before. I mean it with the "not betaed" tag. So if you see something, say something ... unless it's about untended parcels in the rail station. In that case, just say nothing and drink to forget ;-)


	38. Wednesday, 24 June 2015

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the slight delay! Another night where I couldn't keep my eyes open.

“You must be Jack,” Joelle comes around the table where she’s been setting out supplies and extends a hand in greeting as Jack enters the room. “I’m Joelle Martin. Thank you _so much_ for helping out today.”

Jack accepts her hand and shakes it. He’d expected someone slightly shorter from the photos he’s seen of Joelle with George and the team, but then realizes that, of course, almost anyone will look short next to a team of hockey players. In real life, she’s maybe an inch or two taller than George, and rounder, though the pile of braids on her head -- shot through with red and purple -- brings her nearly level with his chin. She has kind eyes.

“Jack,” he says in response, even though she’s already identified him, “I’m happy to be here. What do you need me to do?”

* * *

Jack hadn’t expected to spend Wednesday afternoon helping Joelle teach a group of six- and seven-year-olds at the Providence Athenaeum how to make pinhole cameras and develop photographs. But on Monday afternoon Georgia had telephoned him sounding somewhat harried.

“Jack? Is this a good time?”

“Fine,” Jack had affirmed, juggling his phone and the stack of books he had in his arm. She’d caught him just as he was leaving the Pawtucket public Library. He was expecting a call from Eric during his mid-afternoon break, the only reason he had the phone set to vibrate at all; he habitually kept it on silent. “What do you need?”

“I’ve noticed you're something of a photographer,” Georgia had said. “My wife, Joelle, is teaching a summer workshop for kids -- six- and seven-year-olds -- at the Providence Athenaeum and her co-instructor’s had a family emergency that took her out of state. Jo needs a second pair of hands and I thought of how good you’ve been with the kids on Saturday…?”

“Sure,” Jack had agreed.

He’d been a little surprised by how happy he is, actually, to be asked. Since running into Georgia and Emmy at the arena that day the family’s childcare fell through, he’s found himself thinking a lot about Georgia and her wife. He may even have gone hunting online for images from Falconer’s events, scanning the photographs for glimpses of Georgia and Joelle together, which were fairly easy to find -- even a few pictures with Georgia or Joelle with a baby Emmy strapped to their chests in one of those wrap things that he sees around. The last time he stopped by Georgia’s office to ask her a question, he’d noticed the family photograph sitting by her computer monitor, and the baby pictures pinned to the corkboard next to giant wall calendar where the team schedule for the year is mapped out. The juxtaposition makes something in his chest ache a little.

He’s been looking for clues, he realizes, about how possible it might be to do this. Not only be out to his teammates, but to be visibly part of a couple. To be visibly attached to a family that doesn’t look like the family his father had, the family that every other hockey player he’s ever known has had: the wife, the ex-wife, the girlfriend, the kids. He and Bitty don’t look like that, and neither to Georgia and Joelle. And while it’s true that Georgia isn’t herself a player -- Jack is under no illusions that his own public declaration would be near non-event the way Georgia’s hiring, marriage, maternity leave, and return to the team seem to have been -- there’s still something about the Martins that fascinates him.

“I’d be happy to help out,” he’d told Georgia on Monday as he walked out to his car in the library parking lot. “I mean, I’ve only ever taken the one class--”

Georgia had laughed, “Oh! Don’t worry about it. I mean, knowing your way around a camera will be a plus -- but they’re going to be building pinhole cameras and learning how to develop photographs from the negatives. There are twelve students enrolled and that’s just too many for Jo to handle by herself.”

“Sure,” Jack said again, as he reached the Honda dropped the stack of books on the hood so he could pull out his keys. “Where and when do you want me?”

* * *

“Mr. Z, can you help?” asks a tiny girl sporting a pair of round glasses with bright red frames. They’re making the pinhole cameras out of Quaker Oats cylinders and she’s struggling to tape the aperture flap over the hole they’d cut together in the lid. Jack puts his hand on the soon-to-be-camera so she can affix the tape in place, then looks around at the rest of his table as he does, to see whether any of the other six kids he’s been charged with need assistance. They’re all bent to their work. At the other table, Joelle is bent over to speak with a student, pointing to something on their cylinder and murmuring something before moving on to the next.

“Mr. Z?” Sarina, the girl next to him pipes up with another question. “I need to pee.”

Jack recalls the layout of the hall outside the room where they’re working. “It’s right down at the end of the hall that way,” -- he points -- “by the drinking fountain. Do you need help finding it?”

“I got it!” She pushes back from the table with her single hand and skips off down the hall to the bathroom while Jack turns to Ahmed, the quiet boy on his left.

“How’s your table doing?” Joelle asks, coming over to check on them. Her soft Southern accent is disconcertingly like Eric’s and Suzanne’s; all morning Jack has felt a slight vertigo at worlds’ colliding every time she speaks.

“I think we’re all ready?” Jack picks up his own pinhole camera box and pops open the lid. “We’ll put the photo paper in here?”

Joelle nods. “I’ve got that stack you helped me pre-cut in the dark room. We’ll have to help the kids put the film in three at a time -- the room is small -- so maybe if you can keep an eye on them out here? I’ll help them all get the cameras loaded and then we’ll go outside where the light is good.”

They get the kids’ cameras all set and then troop out onto the lawn where Joelle talks to the kids for a couple of minutes about composition before sending them off in pairs to take their photos on the front steps of the library.

“You’re from somewhere down south?” He asks, to make conversation while they wait the thirty seconds it will take for the kids to set up their shots, open the apertures, and sing the stanza of “Row, row, row your boat” they’ve been instructed to sing before closing it up again.

“I grew up in Atlanta,” Joelle tells him, which explains the accent. “I came up here to go to RISD and never left.”

“I have ... my friend Eric is from Georgia,” Jack says, “I thought your accent sounded familiar.”

Joelle laughs, “Yeah, it’s hard to take the South out of us Southerners, even if we never plan to move back!”

“You like it here?”

“I won’t lie, I didn’t plan to stay much beyond graduation but --” Joelle shrugs, “-- Georgia and I both have our work here, now. And we have to be careful about where we move, especially with Emmy. We’re married in Rhode Island but if we moved to Georgia, I wouldn’t be assured any parental rights when it comes to my own daughter.”

Jack shakes his head, “I hope that changes soon.”

Joelle looks at him, narrowly, tucking a braid that’s fallen loose back behind her ear. “Me too.”

Jack wonders what she’s thinking, and feels the sudden urge to blurt out something like _I’m gay!_ or _I’m actually dating my friend from Madison!_ How do people do this without sounding completely awkward? And, anyway, he promised Bitty he wouldn’t say anything about their relationship to people connected to the team until they’ve had a chance to talk.

“We sang the _whole_ song! And Robbie stood still as a statue!” one of the kids informs them, running up with the camera clutched in her hands. “Can we develop it now?”

“Just you wait a minute for the others,” Joelle says. “Jack, maybe you could go stand over there and -- everyone who’s ready to go back inside, stand over there by Jack!” She raises her voice slightly, to call out to the students.

Jack moves a few feet to his left and is soon joined by a knot of kids clutching their Quaker Oats box cameras.

“Hey,” he says, for something they can do while waiting for the rest of the group “Shall we take a picture with my camera?” He pulls out his phone and thumbs open the screen. The kids cluster around him as he crouches down, crowding in and mugging for the camera as he holds it out in front of them. His arm is long, but he can still only get a crowded frame, showing himself and about five small faces with the gap-toothed smiles of kids starting to lose their baby teeth.

He remembers, suddenly, the cameras of sports journalists being shoved in his face at their age. Of the way he trained himself not to smile with his mouth open once his teeth started falling out because he was embarrassed by way his grown-up teeth didn’t look like they fit in his mouth. There are a lot of family portraits from that era where Bob and Alicia are smiling like movie stars and between them stands a small, round-faced child wearing glasses slightly too big for his face and a faint frown.

He grins, to match the kids around him, and snaps a few photos just as Joelle comes over with the final few stragglers to lead everyone back inside.

“Ready for the dark room?” She asks the kids, some of whom cheer in response. Jack rises to his feet and counts heads to make sure they have all twelve children before they head back through the front doors of the library.

Later, he’ll send the best photo to Bitty, and maybe his parents too. His mother was always saying how good he was with kids. It's something Jack’s never thought much about, because for him being with kids is mostly just a relief from spending time with grown-ups who demand so much more from him. The kids are happy with their box cameras and a few spontaneous selfies. None of the kids in this class seem to know what he does for a living. Joelle had, at his request, just introduced him as her helper for the day. 

Maybe he’ll talk to her about doing another class like this, maybe with kids a little older -- he could take a group of kids out to Swan Point Cemetery to practice nature photography, maybe. Or out to those falls he’d gone to with Dev and Pogs.

Jack smiles to himself, and slips his phone back into his pocket thoughtfully.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For folks who aren't local ... RISD is [Rhode Island School of Design](http://www.risd.edu/%20) in Providence, RI.
> 
> The Providence Athenaeum is a private library founded in 1838 and has a [Children's Library space](https://providenceathenaeum.org/childrens/about/) with lots of free programming. I made up this photography workshop Joelle is teaching -- I have no idea whether the Athenaeum has the facilities to host a temporary dark-room set up!
> 
> [Same-sex marriage has been legally recognized in Rhode Island since 2013](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_Rhode_Island) and they had civil unions for several years before that. Since Emmy was born in the fall of 2012, I suspect that Georgia and Joelle likely had some form of civil union before their marriage would have been recognized in an attempt to ensure legal parental rights for both of them (Georgia was the pregnant parent). 
> 
> Providence has this amazing youth art non-profit [AS220 Youth](http://youth.as220.org/programs/photo/photo-mem/) that focuses on bringing arts opportunities to youth who are in the care of the state, including youth in juvenile detention facilities. I think Joelle will absolutely get Jack working with these kids somehow -- even though they're a little older than the age he's most comfortable with (the under-10s).


	39. Thursday, 25 June 2015

A violent band of thunderstorms blows through Georgia on Thursday night, several hours of sheeting rain and lashing wind blowing wet leaves against the glass of Eric's bedroom windows. Eric lays in bed staring sleeplessly at the wild shadows and flashes of lightning that cut across his ceiling and waits. Since he was a child, thunderstorms have made Eric jumpy. He doesn’t cry through them, anymore, but neither does he find them soothing. Even if he’s deep asleep it’s a rare storm that doesn’t wake him in the night, and if he’s already awake he knows enough not to bother trying to fall asleep until it’s over.

Instead, he lays awake and thinks about the fact that a week from tomorrow, Jack will be arriving in Atlanta on the 8:40am flight from Boston. Because of course Jack booked the flight that requires him to get up insanely early. Actually, what he’s doing is going up to Boston on the train the night before and staying overnight in one of the hotels by the airport so he can roll out of bed two hours before his flight leaves. Which still means getting up at 4am.

“Lord, Jack, what were you thinking?” Eric had asked over dinner that evening. The rain, at that point, had been a distant bank of clouds in the western sky and he and Jack were talking like they have been every night (except Wednesdays which have become kitchen crew pool night). He knows Jack can afford the night in Boston, but it still feels scandalous to spend money on a hotel just to make an earlier flight.

“I was thinking if I took the early flight I’d get to spend the whole day with you,” Jack says, raising an eyebrow and quirking a fond smirk that Eric secretly hopes is just for him. He doesn’t want to think about anyone else in the world being on the receiving end of Jack Zimmermann’s rare, sexy smiles.

He’d already been in bed reading when Eric called a few minutes after nine … because Jack is secretly a seventy-year-old man trapped in the body of a twenty-five year old, Eric’s decided. Not that he hadn’t had his suspicions about this back in the Haus, but watching Jack living on his own has just confirmed this five thousand times over. Jack goes to the library and checks out a stack of books each Monday afternoon. Then, he goes to bed at about eight every evening and reads until Eric calls. He wakes up between five and six every morning, even on weekends, and gets up for a run or to go workout at the arena. If the rare selfies he sends Eric are representative of his social life, apart from hockey Jack socializes mainly with Bean, old married couples, and children under the age of ten.

Eric absorbs each of these facts with adoration, obsessively rehearsing them to himself like he memorizes the lyric to each new Beyoncé song, letting the rhythm of the music sink into his body as he listens to each track over and over and over again. Until it feels like it _belongs_ to him.

He never thought he’d be able to do the same with Jack.

Jack had been wearing his glasses tonight and Eric had thought he might expire right there at the kitchen table eating the last of his mother’s plum tart because sleepy Jack in glasses, and his hair tousled against the pile of pillows he’s propped up against to read is Eric’s new favorite thing, possibly second only to the nights when Jack uses his laptop for Skype instead of FaceTime and the screen is big enough that Eric can see Monsieur Éléphant propped on the bedside table or peeking out from behind the pillows, or holding Jack’s place in the book he’s set aside so they can talk. It’s like that book, Where’s Waldo? that Eric remembers vaguely from childhood.

Tonight -- while they were talking about Jack’s plans to go see Billy and Yannick on the weekend, and Dex’s worrying silence on the group chat this summer, and Ransom and Holster’s plans to meet at Niagara Falls on Canada Day and the 4th of July this year, and how ready Eric is for the weekend and the two-week break from Camp -- Eric kept thinking about how in _one more week_ he’s going to be able to reach out and run his hands through Jack’s hair, climb into Jack’s lap and kiss that smirk off his face, push his hands up under the worn cotton t-shirts Jack favors as sleepwear.

One more week and Jack will be in this room, if Eric wants him there, in this bed. He hasn’t broached the subject of sleeping arrangements with his parents yet -- there’s a guest bedroom down the hall and Jack can always stay there. But even if Jack’s officially in the guest bedroom it’s not like they won’t have chances to -- chances to --

Eric rolls over and presses his face into Señor Bunny’s worn tummy with a groan, just as another cloudburst starts pounding against the window.

There have been moments during the last few weeks when Eric has felt like his skin is going to split open, cracking like the desert earth from the absence of Jack’s touches. It waxes and wanes but never entirely fades and something about their conversation tonight -- the dawning realization that Jack really _is_ coming down to Madison, that his boyfriend really _is_ going to be here -- has made his skin twitch, made everything touching his body uncomfortably scratchy, even the soft sheets against his bare skin, the threadbare cotton of his pillowcases.

The storm makes Eric restless and jumpy, but there’s also something private about being cocooned in his room with the windows closed against the wind and the rain, thunder muffled by walls and double-glazing, his parents presumably asleep -- storms never seemed to bother them unduly -- in the master bedroom. He’s aware that whatever noises he makes in here are covered three times over by the rain and the wind and the sound of the oscillating fans, a summertime constant down here in Georgia even with central air.

He rolls back over and stretches, easing his storm-tight shoulders against the mattress and letting his legs fall open ever-so-slightly to the close air of the room. He lets himself drift back to the image of Jack in his glasses and rumpled Samwell t-shirt, the dorky plaid boxers he was wearing a lot at the Haus this spring as the weather got warmer. Eric thinks about tucking himself in against Jack’s chest, the way he could hide from the storm in the crook of Jack’s neck, let Jack smooth his broad hands down Eric’s spine. He shivers, despite the heat, imagining the way Jack’s fingers might count the bumps of his vertebrae, smoothing, checking, massaging out the knots of muscle, tracing the curve of each rib out and down and back again as they lay there breathing together. Out and in, in and out, Jack’s chest rising and falling even with Eric nestled there atop him. He thinks about the way his knees, calves, thighs would bracket Jack’s hips, his toes tucked under the back of Jack’s knees. He wonders if Jack’s ticklish there, and if he wiggles his toes would Jack laugh.

He smiles, and then catches his own bottom lip between his teeth and bites down, feeling the tension in his jaw as he imagines --

\-- his imagination fails him, is the trouble. Eric’s read and watched porn but he knows enough to know not to trust what he sees and reads about. Stories are stories -- what will it actually _feel_ like to have Jack’s erection pressing up against his belly? Porn might give him some ideas of how two male bodies might fit together -- but it can’t tell him what exactly he’s going to like. He wants to try _everything_ but it’s been over a month since Jack kissed him and Eric’s had a lot of time to wonder what his traitorous body might do in response to Jack. He wants, oh he wants, and he knows he wants Jack -- that stopped being a question halfway through last fall semester. He just hopes Jack will be as patient and gentle with him about sex as he was all those early-morning hours on the ice.

 _I’d just rather learn with you._ Jack had said, when they'd talked about kissing.

Eric closes his eyes against the flickers of lightning and skims a hand down over his chest to the over-heated inside of his thigh, then back up, feeling the way his skin prickles at the touch. He scrapes a thumbnail across one of his nipples and bites his lip against the sharp edge of feeling it produces. He brings his other hand up and mirrors the down-up arc on the other side, letting his legs fall open wider, drawing his heels up a little to find purchase on the mattress, pushing down and flexing the muscles in his thighs, feeling everything tighten.

He fumbles for a knot of sheet and fists it in his hand, scrapes his fingers down through the scratchy curls plastered with sweat between his legs. He’s tried not to look at Jack naked in the locker room, and wonders now what color the hair he has down there is -- whether, like Eric, he has lighter and darker strands, whether it gathers low on his belly, whether Eric could run his fingers down through the hair on Jack’s chest in an unbroken path to his groin.

Eric spreads his legs further and reaches, awkwardly far, tracing his fingers down further, palming sensitive flesh, working himself a little roughly. He lets himself moan, softly, imagines he’s letting Jack know just how good his hands feel, how good it is to do this with Jack, how safe he feels in Jack’s hands, how he knows he can let go and Jack will be there to catch him.

It doesn’t take long, even with the distraction of the thunder that tugs at the edge of Eric’s consciousness. All he has to do is imagine Jack pressed to his side, one arm cradling Eric to his chest, the other hand in place of Eric’s pulling and twisting and rubbing while they kiss and kiss and keep on kissing until --

\-- Eric curls in on himself, achingly conscious of the body that isn’t there to curl against, the body that he wants so badly to know in this way. He comes hard anyway, almost painfully so, gasping -- a ragged sound lost against the white noise of storm --, feeling the orgasm from the tingle in his toes to the way his scalp crawls as if slightly electrified.  
And then it’s over, surprisingly quick, like orgasms always are, and Eric is left panting against the receding tide of desperate wanting. Even while his hand is still fisted in the sheet he can feel the rest of his body letting go into sleep -- and he lets himself drift.

A week from today -- it must be Friday morning by now -- Jack will be on his way to Georgia. And for ten whole days, at least, Eric won’t have to feel quite so parched for touch. Maybe he can figure out how to store up enough contact-time with Jack -- like a long-lasting battery -- that he’ll be able to get through the rest of July and the first few days of August without the same level of hunger that has taken him by surprise this June.

There’s no two ways about it, Eric thinks with a grin as he finally sinks fully into slumber. Jack’s just going to have to suffer through a lot of nudity for the sake of Eric’s health. That’s all there is to it.

He doesn’t think Jack is likely to argue the point.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have been convinced by data from zaftig_darling that in Georgia air conditioning is more of a necessity than a luxury (or at least an overwhelming cultural norm), and consequently changed a few passages that -- in the initial version -- implied that Eric's family do not have central air at home. And who says data isn't useful ;-)!


	40. Friday, 26 June 2015

Shortly after ten, Jack comes out of the empty locker room after his shower and almost runs into George, who’s standing in the hallway reading something on her phone.

“Sorry, I didn’t --” he starts to apologize, just as she says, sounding startled, “Jack! I didn’t realize anyone was --” and that’s when he notices her eyes are wet with tears.

“Are you okay?” He glances up and down the hall, half-hoping someone else -- anyone else -- will be around to help if the answer is “no.” But it’s Friday and the only other person in the weight room this morning had been Pogs, who’s since disappeared.

He puts out a hand, then realizes she’s smiling broadly through her tears.

“What?” She asks, then. “Oh! Yeah, I’m -- I’m good.” She reaches up to wipe her face with her free hand. “Don’t mind me, I was just --” the phone in her hand starts to play a tune Jack feels he should know but can’t immediately name.

“Hold on just -- I have to take this.” She accepts the call and turns slightly away from Jack, who stands there, awkwardly, with his bag over his shoulder. On the one hand, he feels as if he’s intruding -- but he also doesn’t feel comfortable just walking away.

“Oh my _God_ babe -- did you _see_?! Can you believe -- God, I’m crying. Shit. I can’t believe I’m crying,” Georgia is saying into the phone, loud enough that Jack can’t help but overhear. There’s a pause as the person -- Joelle, he assumes -- on the other end of the line says something and then Georgia is laughing, shaking her head, “No, I know, I know everyone was saying -- but did you actually believe they would --? ...Right? _God_ \--”

“Yo!” Pogs sticks his head out of the player’s lounge down the hall. “Dude! I thought I heard someone out here -- you gotta see this!” Gratefully, with a glance over his shoulder at Georgia, Jack pushes away from the wall and walks the thirty feet to the door where Pogs is already turning back into the room. He’s got the big flat screen television in the corner on -- the one the guys seem to use to watch tape and play video games in equal measure. Bean, on the couch, thumps her tail when Jack appears but doesn’t move to get up. He goes over to stand behind the sofa and scratch her head while he peers at the television screen and tries to decipher what breaking news has got Georgia and now Pogs all excited.

There’s some sort of open-air press conference happening, rainbow flags flying and people cheering in the background. Then the scroller along the bottom of the screen registers and finally he understands what he’s seeing: _U.S. SUPREME COURT RULES 5-4 IN FAVOR OF SAME-SEX MARRIAGE. ALL STATES MUST ISSUE MARRIAGE LICENSES TO SAME-SEX COUPLES._

“Can you believe it?” Pogs asks, rubbing his hands together, “Can you believe they actually did it?! My sister and her girlfriend are gonna be _stoked_ man! Hell, _I’m_ stoked.”

“That’s -- wow.” Jack manages, mouth suddenly dry. He feels a sudden wave of shame that he hasn’t been paying more attention to the news, that he had no idea that the decision might come down today.

Now that he’s standing here, he recalls hearing something on NPR earlier in the week about how the _Obergefell_ decision would be issued soon -- he’d noticed the name of the case, specifically, because Shitty had practically read the entire oral argument transcript out loud to the Haus back in April. In Jack’s defense, same-sex marriage had been legal in Canada since 2005 and his uncles have been married both in Canada and in the state of Massachusetts for years. So he hasn’t spent a lot of time worrying about marriage equality in the U.S. Besides, during his years at Samwell Jack had been able to count on Shitty ensuring he knew the highlights of whatever political or legal developments were relevant -- living next door to Shitty you couldn’t help but trip over them.

Now he suddenly thinks about his conversation with Joelle two days ago -- . _..if we moved to Georgia I wouldn’t be assured any parental rights…_ \-- she’d said, with a tired shrug.

And today, here they are.

_Eric._

He drops his duffle bag on the floor and digs out his phone. The little green message light is flashing and when he wakes up the screen there are a whole series of incoming texts filling up his notifications. Shitty, Lardo, the SMH group, plus a series of texts and at least one missed call from Bitty.

He scrolls through the texts, keeping one eye on the CNN coverage as Georgia walks into the room. Pogs gives her a little hug around the shoulders and they start comparing the commentary on CNN with the information they’ve pulled up on their phones.

Bitty’s obviously already heard the news:

_Jack! OMG!!_  
_Are you watching this??_  
_The Supreme Court just made gay marriage LEGAL IN ALL FIFTY STATES @_@_

_Twitter is going CRAZY_  
_Shit shit shit I’m going to cry_

_Oh Lord! Give your uncles my congratulations!_  
_And Georgia and Joelle too_  
_Oh my goodness_  
    
  

Jack smiles down at his phone and texts back:

_I just saw._  
_Very cool._

_Pogs is here -- turns out his sister’s gay??_  
_He says she and her girlfriend will be happy._  
_He’s happy for them._  
_I ran into Georgia crying in the hallway._

_We’re watching it all on CNN._

Eric must not be on his way to work yet because he responds in seconds:

 _It’s amazing Jack!_  
_You should --_  
_Oh my God I know you don’t use Twitter but_  
_Everyone’s turning their user icons into rainbows!_  


_Mama and I are sitting here in the basement watching the live blog_  
_And listening to NPR_  
_It’s AMAZING_

Jack clutches his phone and thinks about Eric and his mother watching this unfold down in Madison while he’s standing here with Georgia and Pogs. It feels momentous, and somehow disorienting -- not at all what he’d expected when he woke up this morning. A few other people have drifted in, now from the administrative staff -- Amani and Nate from the publicity team, and a guy named Evan from the facilities staff. They’ve all gathered around to watch the screen, and poke madly at their phones where they’re pulling up other news sources. Jack hears Georgia give Nate the green light to put the Falconers social media icons through the rainbow filter to show the team support for the decision and smiles as he types to Eric:

_Do you follow the Falconers on Twitter or Facebook?_

Eric responds:

_Of course I do sweetheart, why?_

_What?! @_@_  
_Jack! Your team has a RAINBOW LOGO RIGHT NOW_

Jack writes back:  
  
_I just heard George OK it with Nate our social media guy :-D._  
_He’s probably just as fast as you are with his phone._

He’s not even done with his second text when the message from Eric pops up:

 _Can I marry your entire team??_  


Jack grins and types back, teasing:

_One Falconer isn’t enough for you?_

To which Eric responds:

 _Only if that one Falconer is you_  


It’s stupid, but Jack feels a flush of pleasure anyway.

“Listen up everyone!” Georgia says, as Jack looks back up from his phone to see what’s happening on screen. “I say this calls for a celebration lunch! Joelle and Emmy and I are meeting at AS220 at noon. Anyone who wants to join us, lunch is on the team.”

Someone in the small knot of people gives a small _whoop!_ of delight and Jack looks around and realizes that he’s standing among … allies. People who-- even if they or their families are not directly affected by this decision -- have been rooting for marriage equality and are excited to celebrate the fact that it’s been won.

“Okay,” he says, quietly to himself. “Okay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many of you likely remember where you were a year ago today when the [_Obergefell_](http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/obergefell-v-hodges/) decision was released on 26 June 2015. I was sitting in a board meeting, watching [the SCOTUSBlog live feed](http://live.scotusblog.com/Event/Live_blog_of_opinions__June_26_2015?Page=0%20) with one eye while we worked through our agenda for the day. My wife was at work. Both of us got a little unexpectedly teary, like Georgia, surrounded by colleagues who were either celebrating the legal recognition of their own relationships or being excited, supportive allies. Marriage equality certainly has certainly never been the be-all and end-all of the modern LGBTQ rights movement, but it's [a major victory nonetheless](https://thefeministlibrarian.com/2015/07/03/recommended-reading-on-obergefell/) \-- and certainly one that would have had a significant impact in Eric's [home state of Georgia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Georgia_\(U.S._state\)) where, prior to the decision, only limited domestic partnership rights were recognized in some municipalities such as Atlanta.
> 
> [AS220](http://as220.org/foodanddrink/) is a restaurant in downtown Providence attached to the artists' nonprofit that I mentioned in last night's notes.


	41. Saturday, 27 June 2015

A Twitter conversation between:

 **@omgcheckplease  
** Baker, former figure skater, and the shortest member of the Samwell hockey team!

 **@shitsgetsreal**  
"We’re gonna be fifty-year-old libertines in a world full of twenty-year-old Calvinists."

 **@larrisart  
** Painting. Hockey. Stony more than Stucky. Trash Black Widow and I will end you.

 **@holst_hockeyshit**  
Hockey explainer, hockey player, pop culture aficionado. Besties w/@rans_hockeyshit

 **@rans_hockeyshit**  
I can kill you with my brain. Besties w/@holst_hockeyshit. (Why yes, I *am* Canadian.)

* * *

**@omgcheckplease  
** TFW you drive by the county clerk’s office in your hometown & there are anti-gay protestors outside :-/

 **@shitsgetsreal  
** @omgcheckplease NOT OKAY LITTLE BRAH (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)

 **@larrisart  
** @omgcheckplease @shitsgetsreal need me & Shitty to come kick their asses with you, Bits?

 **@omgcheckplease  
** @larrisart @shitsgetsreal U_U y’all are too kind <3

 **@holst_hockeyshit  
** @omgcheckplease hey @rans_hockeyshit and I can be down there in 15 hours cc @shitsgetsreal @larrisart

 **@rans_hockeyshit  
** @omgcheckplease SMH have a reputation to maintain dude. What would Jack say if we didn’t have your back? @holst_hockeyshit @shitsgetsreal @larrisart

 **@holst_hockeyshit  
** @rans_hockeyshit bro, I think you mean what would HOLSTER say if we didn’t have your back? @omgcheckplease @shitsgetsreal @larrisart

 **@holst_hockeyshit  
** @rans_hockeyshit how would I ever LIVE WITH MYSELF if we left Bits to defend our honor in Georgia?? @omgcheckplease @shitsgetsreal @larrisart

 **@omgcheckplease  
** @holst_hockeyshit @rans_hockeyshit @shitsgetsreal @larrisart as much as I appreciate the sentiment ladies & gentleman, I’ll have you know +

 **@omgcheckplease  
** @holst_hockeyshit @rans_hockeyshit @shitsgetsreal @larrisart + I am perfectly capable of defending my own honor.

 **@omgcheckplease  
** @holst_hockeyshit @rans_hockeyshit @shitsgetsreal @larrisart Let's just say I bought a nice big popsicle from the gas station up the road +

 **@omgcheckplease  
** @holst_hockeyshit @rans_hockeyshit @shitsgetsreal @larrisart + enjoyed it in…graphic detail on the hood of Coach’s truck (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧

 **@rans_hockeyshit**  
@omgcheckplease PICTURES OR IT DIDN’T HAPPEN!  @holst_hockeyshit @shitsgetsreal @larrisart

 **@omgcheckplease  
** @rans_hockeyshit @holst_hockeyshit @shitsgetsreal @larrisart *sigh* … yeah, I know. I WISH I could have done that but +

 **@omgcheckplease  
** @rans_hockeyshit @holst_hockeyshit @shitsgetsreal @larrisart + TFW there are a dozen of them & one of you? :-/

 **@shitsgetsreal  
** @omgcheckplease don’t be hard on yourself Bits. assholes like that can get mean as fuck when they’re scared.

 **@larrisart  
** @omgcheckplease SO not worth it dude. they LOST. #LoveWins right?

 **@omgcheckplease  
** @shitsgetsreal thank you ((hugs)) … *sigh*

 **@holst_hockeyshit  
** @omgcheckpelase FIFTEEN HOURS me & @rans_hockeyshit could help you kick their asses

 **@omgcheckplease  
** @larrisart #LoveWins OMG did you see? <http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local/same-sex-couples-already-tying-the-knot/nmmZw/>

**@omgcheckplease  
** @holst_hockeyshit you mean FIFTEEN HOURS & @rans_hockeyshit gets deported back across the border for assault <_<

 **@omgcheckplease  
** @holst_hockeyshit@rans_hockeyshit thanks really, tho. I know y’all mean it. *fist bump*

 **@larrisart  
** @omgcheckplease *high five* so awesome, dude!!

 **@shitsgetsreal  
** @omgcheckplease @larrisart need something to make you laugh? <http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-scotus-marriage-decision-in-haiku>

 **@omgcheckplease** @larrisart @shitsgetsreal  
  
“Happiness is not  
the point of marriage, fools. It’s  
BABIES,” he whispered."

 **@larrisart** @omgcheckplease @shitsgetsreal  


**@shitsgetsreal  
** @larrisart @omgcheckplease so brah! you gonna celebrate?

 **@omgcheckplease  
** @shitsgetsreal @larrisart you mean besides passive-aggressively licking popsicles ;-)?

 **@omgcheckplease  
** @shitsgetsreal @larrisart it still feels pretty unreal, TBH.

 **@omgcheckplease  
** @shitsgetsreal @larrisart & I’m still counting down the days until … you know U_U

 **@shitsgetsreal  
** @omgcheckplease @larrisart OH WE KNOW.

 **@larrisart  
** @shitsgetsreal Shitty. <_< @omgcheckplease have a great time!

 **@omgcheckplease  
** @larrisart @shitsgetsreal OH I PLAN TO -_-

 **@shitsgetsreal  
** @omgcheckplease @larrisart WOOT!

 **@omgcheckplease  
** @shitsgetsreal @larrisart gotta go you guys - burgers coming off the grill. thanks again!

 **@larrisart  
** @omgcheckplease @shitsgetsreal any time, you know that Bits, right?

 **@omgcheckplease  
** @shitsgetsreal @larrisart I do you guys. I really do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shitty's Twitter bio is a quote from Armistead Maupin's [Tales of the City](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_the_City). It's ex-lawyer Brian Hawkins talking to his friend Michael "Mouse" Tolliver about the post-Sixties backlash while smoking pot.
> 
> The first part of Ransom's bio is a quote from _Firefly_. In my head, Rans and Holster have the passwords to each others' Twitter and have been known to trade accounts from time to time and see if anyone notices.
> 
> Sad that Bitty didn't feel safe enough to make out with a popsicle in front of the anti-gay bigots? Well then, go read (or re-read) "[the ice pop fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5853757/chapters/13492360)" my friends. You will thank me.


	42. Sunday, 28 June 2015

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This specific chapter fulfills the [TwelveInTwelve2016](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/TwelveInTwelve2016/profile) prompt for June: an epistolary fic.

**To:** Alicia A. Zimmermann  <alicia@zimmermann.org>  
**From:** Bill Martel-Amory  <william.amory@wentworth.edu>  
**Sent:** Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 3:27 PM  
**Subject:** Visit from Jack

Dear Ali,

Just said goodbye to Jack, who’s on his way back to Pawtucket after spending the night with us. It was good to see him. He seems to be settling in at the new job and figuring out how to live like an adult. “Adulting” as my students would say. Ha! Do you remember that summer after college when I lived with seven other guys in that house in Brighton? I’m not even sure we had a vacuum cleaner. Jack is miles ahead of us already.

He’s as quiet and reserved as always, but seems more at peace than he’s been in a long time. Who knows whether that’s Samwell or Eric or finally playing pro hockey -- probably a combination of all three -- multicausal as my friends in the history department would likely say. But whatever the causes, I can attest to the effect. Jack in May and again this weekend seems the most relaxed he’s been since … well, maybe since before puberty! Maybe he’s just finally growing up

He’s a neat and undemanding houseguest -- mostly hung out on the couch reading with Angus and Fergus. Offered to help me refinish the patio furniture which, between the two of us, we were able to get the job done on Saturday afternoon. He had some questions about how I’d handled being out at work -- he mentioned talking to you so I know I’m not sharing anything confidential. If I had to guess, I’d say you’re probably going to have a son who’s at least out to his teammates and the Falconers staff before the year is out. Reading between the lines, it sounded to me like he almost came out on Friday when they were all celebrating _Obergefell_.

You’ve met this George and her wife Joelle? Sounds like they’ve taken a particular interest in Jack and I wouldn’t be surprised if they already strongly suspect. We in the LGBT community like to take care of our own -- and if managing hockey players is anything like teaching undergraduates I’d wager you learn how to read the signs long before the kids themselves are ready to trust you with their secrets.

Thank you, sis, for the special delivery from Brookline Liquor Mart. You know me too well. Was the rainbow theme in evidence on the beer labels something the clerks cooked up on their own, or did you nudge them along? Either way, Yannick and I appreciate your (extravagant as always) congratulations and are enjoying being legally married all over again for the fourth time … not the most-gay-married couple in our circle of friends but certainly enough to be dismissable by all the radicals now complaining about “homonormativity.” I’d scoff “kids these days” but a good handful of them are from my GCN days, so I know better than to blame it on the next generation.

Angus and Fergus are looking longingly at the door reminding me it’s time for our afternoon walk so -- off I go! Talk to you soon,  
  
~B.

* * *  
Bill Martel-Amory, Ph.D.  
Professor of Architecture  
Wentworth Institute of Technology  
wit.edu/arch/faculty/martel-amory  
@bmartam

* * *

**To:** Bill Martel-Amory  <william.amory@wentworth.edu>  
**From:** Alicia A. Zimmermann  <alicia@zimmermann.org>  
**Sent:** Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 5:28 PM  
**Subject:** RE: Visit from Jack

Thank you so much for the note, Bill. It’s heartening to hear you confirm my own observations about Jack’s health and the maturity he’s displayed in recent months. I have always suspected (but assumed a certain amount of parental bias) that once Jack reached adulthood he might settle into his own skin a bit more. As a child he always seemed ill at ease with children his own age. I chalked some of it up to his being an only child, but not all of it. I’ve always said to Bob some part of him seems to have been born an old soul. So perhaps his external life finally matches his internal life.

Ha ha. Listen to me sounding like such a New Age nut. Aunt Toni would approve!

I’m so happy they pulled it off! When I told the young man on the phone I wanted them to put together a gift box in celebration of _Obergefell_ he had the absolutely brilliant idea to put together a selection of beers with rainbow-colored labels but of course I had no way of knowing how well the concept hold up in execution. I’ll be sure to email them a glowing review and suggest they offer it as a themed gift option on their website! A superb marketing strategy, particularly during June.

Love to Yannick and the pups,  
  
Ali

Sent from my iPhone

* * *

**To:** Jack L. Zimmermann  <jack@zimmermann.org>  
**From:** Robert L. Zimmermann  <bob@zimmermann.org>  
**Sent:** Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 4:53 PM  
**Subject:** Gill Lamartine

Jack,

I had lunch on Friday with Gill, that reporter who interviewed me last year for the GQ article. He asked about you, knew you’d signed with the Falconers. He didn’t put it to me outright but I could tell he was hoping for an interview. I suggested he reach out to Georgia Martin and pitch a story about the work the team has been doing to combat racism, sexism, and homophobia within the League. If she’s as smart as I think she is about publicity, she’ll jump at the chance because Gill will be able to sell this to whatever outlet she negotiates for. I’ll vouch for his work. I’m telling you this because he will likely come sniffing around. Consider what you (and Georgia) may wish to tell -- or not tell -- him.

Give my best to Eric when you see him,  
Papa

_**Robert L. Zimmermann** _  
_Executive Director_  
_Zimmermann Foundation_  
_www.zimmermannfoundation.org_

* * *

**To:** Jack L. Zimmermann  <jack@zimmermann.org>  
**From:** Alicia A. Zimmermann  <alicia@zimmermann.org>   
**Sent:** Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 6:12 PM  
**Subject:** just checking in  & a favor

Dear Jack,

I hope you had an easy drive back from the Cape! Bill wrote and said you had a nice visit. How does the patio furniture look? Did he paint it that ugly green color again?

Papa and I leave for Montélimar on Wednesday and I will forward you the final details once I make one change in the hotel reservations. We'll be in France for about three weeks, but you should be able to reach us by email for most of that time. And you know we're always just a phone call away if there's an emergency. 

Did I ever confirm that I got your itinerary for the Georgia trip? Thank you for keeping us in the loop on your travel plans. It looks like you’ll get in nice and early on Friday. Be sure to give Eric our best, and Suzanne and Rich too. 

I have a favor to ask -- I was telling Suzanne last week about that shop in the North End that sells my favorite cinnamon from Sri Lanka. Do you remember when we went there last year? The one with the cat, and the owner who asked your father for an autograph. I’m wondering if -- since you’ll be in Boston next week -- if you would pick up some cinnamon for Suzanne? If it isn’t convenient, I’ll just phone them and pay to have it shipped.

If you’re looking for something to get Eric, there’s a stall in the new Boston Public Market that does handmade marshmallows … perfect for making 4th of July s’mores ;-)

Love,  
Mom

**_Alicia A. Zimmermann_ **  
_Executive Director_  
_Zimmermann Foundation_  
_www.zimmermannfoundation.org_

* * *

**To:** Alicia A. Zimmermann  <alicia@zimmermann.org>   
**From:** Jack L. Zimmermann  <jack@zimmermann.org>  
**Sent:** Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 7:34 AM  
**Subject:** RE: just checking in

Hi Mom,

Thanks for your email. I’ll be happy to pick up the cinnamon for Suzanne. I’m having lunch with Lardo but will still have plenty of time before it’s worth going out to the hotel. I was thinking of going to the Museum of Science.

Yeah, we painted the patio furniture the same shade of green -- sorry!

I'll look out for the itinerary. Is Papa hoping to catch some of the Tour de France again this year?

Love,  
Jack

* * *

**To:** Robert L. Zimmermann  <bob@zimmermann.org>  
**From:** Jack L. Zimmermann  <jack@zimmermann.org>  
**Sent:** Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 7:51 AM  
**Subject:** RE: Gill Lamartine

Papa,

Thanks for the head’s up about Gill. I do remember him. He seemed okay. At least he’s a good writer.

I have an appointment with Marci in Boston tomorrow and one of the things I plan to talk with her about is being out to the team. I had finals and then she was on vacation so I haven’t even had a chance to tell her about Eric. It was good to hear Uncle Billy’s perspective this weekend, about what it means to be out professionally.

I will probably talk to Georgia before the season starts, and maybe tell the team if she and Marci think it’s a good idea and Eric is okay with it.

Eric seems so much happier since he talked to his parents. I’m looking forward to seeing him next week.

Have a good time in Montélimar!

Jack

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I used to live around the corner from [Brookline Liquor Mart](http://www.blmwine.com/index.asp) and can totally picture the staff doing something like rainbow beer gift boxes. They were the nicest non-snobby-yet-knowledgeable liquor store staffs in Boston!
> 
> GCN = [Gay Community News](https://historyproject.omeka.net/collections/show/35) one of the ur-LGBT newspapers, based here in Boston. Aww, Uncle Billy and his activist days. He totally participated in ACT UP die-in protests too. As he should have. *firm nod*
> 
> [Polcari's Coffee](http://polcariscoffee.com/) truly does have the most AMAZING Sri Lankan cinnamon. I send all my Boston-based fic characters there for their spice needs. And they do have a lovely in-store cat who likes to sleep beneath the bulk legumes.


	43. Monday, 29 June 2015

Mama is making the grocery list  
She asks if there’s anything you want us to have in the house

_You._  
_;-)_

  
Has anyone told you that you are a ridiculous boy?

_Ridiculous is not usually a word people use to describe me, no._

Well, they obviously have not been paying attention  
Have they Mr. Zimmermann?  
Because you ARE ridiculous  
Also adorable

_Another word not usually used to describe me._

Also mine

_Accurate._

_To your original question:_  
_Please tell your mom no need to buy anything special._  
_I survived your cooking all last year, after all._

EXCUSE ME??  
Seems to me SOMEONE is asking for his PIE PRIVILEGES to be revoked

_Haha._  
_I know you, Bittle._  
_You wouldn’t last a day._

I suggest you not test the theory by implying my baked goods are something one “survives”  


I actually have another question  


_Shoot._

Um. So.

_Now I’m worried._  
_You’re using punctuation._

Shut up  
So my parents have a guest bedroom  
But I also  
Um  
Have a double bed  
So  
I was just wondering  
Whether you want your own space  
Or

_Your parents would let me stay in your room?_

I may not have asked yet  
If I don’t ask they can’t say no  


_Does that mean you WANT me to stay in your room._  
_In your bed._

Well  
Yes?

_Can you elaborate about the question mark._

_Because I’ve seen your bed on Skype and it looks big enough for two._

_I wasn’t sure your parents would be okay with...us._  
_Sleeping together._  
_It seems like a thing many parents aren’t comfortable with._

_And I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable either._

_Bitty?_

Sorry Sorry!  
Mama asked me a question.

YES  
Yes I want you in my room  
It’s just … I don’t know  
I just can’t imagine ...  
This is embarrassing

_Would it be easier to talk face to face?_  
_I’m in the library but I can find a place to call you._

NO!  
*hides face*  
God no  
Texting is good  
I’m not sure I can get the words out otherwise

_We have an easier time with words when we can also be touching, remember?_

Sometimes I think I’ve made it all up  
I mean I know I haven’t but

_I know what you mean._  
_But can we go back to the bedroom question._  
_Would it feel easier if I stayed in the guest bedroom?_  
_It would be like having me across the hall at the Haus._  
_No reason I’d have to STAY there ;-)_

Okay  
Maybe  
But I don’t want you to think that means I don’t want

_I want too <3_

OMG did you just use a heart emoji?

_I do watch and learn, Bittle._

  
I am looking forward to having you here Jack  
It’s been hard without you  
I didn’t realize  
(or let myself realize)  
How much … of everything we had together already  
Until I thought I was going to lose it  
And I know I haven’t but…

_I’m sorry._

No! No. I wasn’t fishing for an apology  
It’s just  
It’s felt lonely in bed without you

*dies of embarrassment*

_No._  
_Don’t be embarrassed Bits._  
_It’s felt lonely in bed without you here, too._

_Would it be weird if we did a lot of cuddling while I was there?_  
_It’s just I’ve always...liked that._

…thinking...thinking...WAIT NO.  
Jack, you do understand that basically 98.5% of my waking hours right now are thinking about all of the ways I want to cuddle, right?  
And I mean both “cuddling” and cuddling-cuddling

_Oh, there’s a difference? I wasn’t aware._

_Good. Because that’s what I’ve been spending my waking hours thinking about too._

Okay. Good  
Cuddling sounds good  
I mean. TBH Señor Bunny has been getting all up in my face about it  
“When is Monsieur Éléphant gonna visit?”  
Blah blah blah

_Haha. Yeah._  
_Monsieur Éléphant keeps glaring at me._  
_I wake up and there he is staring._  
_He blames me that Señor Bunny is down in Madison._

Obviously you are responsible for how stupid big this country is

Well  
There’s nothing for it  
We’ll just have to suck it up and give them some alone time while you two are here

_Another reason to have the guest bedroom._  
_We can put a sock on their door and beat a hasty retreat._

What have I done to deserve you?

 _You know you don’t have to do anything to “deserve” me, right?  
That’s not how this works._

What if I screw this up? What if

_I almost screwed this up by walking away from you on graduation day._  
_I worry about screwing this up every day._  
_Every hour._  
_Every minute._  
_Because that’s how my brain works, Bits._  
_But I’m learning not to listen to it all the time._  
_We’ll not listen to it together, okay?_

Okay  
  
Okay  
Lord, Jack, have I told you how much I miss you?

_Multiple times._  
_But I won’t mind if you tell me again._

I miss you.  
I miss you and I love you.

_< 3 and :-( Bits._  
  
_See you in four days <3_

Four days!  



	44. Tuesday, 30 June 2015

Jack steps out of the elevator and exits the office building to blink in the midday sunshine. Marci’s office has a window, but she keeps the light soft and the colors deep and mellow. Outside, the light feels harsh and the Boston streets sharp and crowded. His mid-morning appointment -- a holdover from his spring semester schedule -- means he has a couple hours to fill before meeting Shitty at the pub where they’re having lunch. So orients himself on the sidewalk and settles his messenger bag across his shoulders, setting off at a brisk walk toward the Boston Public Garden.

The last day of June is turning out clear with a light breeze that keeps the warm air moving. Although it’s trending toward uncomfortably warm in the sun, the Garden has plenty of shade and Jack picks one of the empty benches by the pond to sit and people-watch. The park on a weekday morning is mostly populated by little knots of tourists -- always present in this part of the city -- and criss-crossed at a steady pace with dog-walkers, joggers, and people in work attire passing through on the way to and from meetings. The regulars are like the grown-up version of students, Jack thinks, making their way from classroom to library to dining hall and back again over the course of the day.

He pulls out his phone and check for messages. He and Eric had texted back a forth a bit while Jack was on the train, but Eric’s been quiet since Jack signed in for his appointment. Camp Oconee started its two-week 4th of July hiatus and Eric’s been busy these last few days helping Suzanne organize for a big arts and crafts expo in Atlanta. Jack takes a picture of the swan boats, and one of the Hancock and Prudential towers rising above the weeping willows, and sends them with a _Wish you were here ;-)._

 

Shitty’s texted once about thirty minutes ago to say he was on his way and then again five minutes ago to say that an accident on Route 3 had slowed traffic to a crawl. _I’m good._ Jack texts back. _Done with my appointment and hanging in the Public Garden. Text me when you get here._

Then he slips his phone back in his bag.

He has a book he could read, of course, but it’s peaceful sitting here and not actually focusing on anything that requires the parsing of an argument or the tracking of a narrative. He fiddles with the straps on his bag, watching a little girl feeding a family of ducks at the water’s edge, and lets his mind replay his conversation with Marci like it plays back over the points won or lost in a game.

Overall it had been a good, a calming, appointment. Even if now Jack’s brain feels tired. He’s always anxious before an appointment that he won’t have anything to say, or not say the right thing -- and they had had a lot of ground to cover since his last appointment in early May. But he’s been seeing Marci since he started at Samwell and she knows when to sit and wait for him to gather his thoughts and when to challenge him with a probing question or two.

 _Pace yourself, Jack_ , she’d said when he had laid out his uncertainties about coming out.

“One of the things to remember -- and I think you and Eric know this already -- about coming out is that it’s not something you do once and a switch is flipped,” Marci had tipped her head and looked at him from the chair she likes to sit in, cross-legged, while they talk. She’s a marathon runner and a yogi, compact and about Lardo’s size, and manages to give the impression of motion even when she’s sitting still.

Jack’s previous therapist had been a much older, quieter woman who favored cardigans and offered him tea at the beginning of every session. When he first began meeting with Marci, Jack had been slightly alarmed by the energy and focus she brought to each appointment -- but he’s grown to appreciate it over the years. It’s been particularly helpful to have someone who understands the way athletes inhabit their bodies in both healthy and unhealthy ways.

“The story the media likes to tell about coming out is a very simplistic one,” Marci had reminded him, “either you’re closeted or you’re not. But in reality, most of us will ‘come out’ in many different ways to different people over our lifetimes. You’ve already shared this part of yourself with many people who are important to you, Jack, starting with yourself. Your parents, your uncles, a few trusted friends, Eric -- now Eric’s parents. That’s a lot of people who know you and care about who you are and that you’re happy. And it sounds like you have reason to trust your new teammates as well. But it’s okay to let them earn your trust before you share this part of your story with them.”

Marci hadn’t given Jack any more clarity about what he should do. She’s pointed out to him more than once in the past, when he’s grumbled about her lack of direction, that he has enough coaches in his life already. But, as was usually the case when he met with her, Jack left the health center feeling more at peace with not having a point-by-point plan for his life ahead than he had felt going in. She’d even given him a squeeze on the arm as he departed, and Jack would swear she winked as she told him to have a good time in Madison.

On his way out of the waiting room, Jack had screwed up the nerve to stop at the desk and take a few condoms and packets of lube from the fishbowl of freebies they keep well-stocked for anyone who wants them. They’re in his bag now, tucked carefully into an interior pocket, making him feel a little bit excited and a little bit intimidated. Maybe he and Eric won’t end up doing anything that requires lube and condoms in the next week but … this way they’ll be prepared without having to make an embarrassing trip to the pharmacy.

He could probably have just asked Lardo, whom he knows makes it something of a point of pride to be utterly nonchalant in the acquisition of all manner of safer-sex supplies for both her hockey players and her friends in the art department. He even remembers -- with a shudder -- the time she talked Holster into driving a group of players and a few interested others up to Good Vibrations in Brookline to stock up.

(It’s not that Jack hasn’t considered the uses to which he might put some of those accessories. He just cannot picture shopping for them in a public space. Let alone with his teammates.)

So he knows Lardo would have come to his rescue if he’d asked -- but now he doesn’t have to. It had been easier than he’d imagined to just take what he needed. No one in the waiting room had even so much as glanced in his direction, though he knew if they had it wouldn’t have been in judgement. The condoms are there to be taken, after all. And someone -- in honor of Pride, maybe, or just for fun -- has taken a rainbow-colored selection of condom packets from the store and pinned them in a cheerful progression across the top of the pin board behind the desk. Here, he’s not The Guy Buying Condoms like it would have been at CVS but just a patient on his way out the door.

Jack pats his bag gently and smiles to himself.

Down the path where he’s chosen to sit, a large walking tour is coming around the edge of the pond, led by a tour guide in a blue polo shirt and matching cap. It stops a few feet away so the guide can tell the story of _Make Way for Ducklings_ and point out the little parade of bronze statues worn bright and shining by the clambering of many small fans.

The chances that someone will recognize him are low, but tour groups make him feel on display nonetheless, so Jack decides to get up and move on. He walks down to the corner of Arlington and Beacon Street and crosses to bottom of the pedestrian overpass that will give him access to the Charles River Esplanade. The walkway carries him over the busy lanes of Storrow Drive and drops him at the Hatch Shell, bustling with preparations for the weekend fireworks. Jack remembers once, in his childhood, when his father had been invited as the celebrity MC for the evening’s event. He must have been very young, because Jack mostly remembers how he had wanted to go swimming in the lagoon and his mother had finally agreed that they could rent a boat and go watch the fireworks from the water. Jack can see the barge already anchored upriver from the Hatch with its bunting and stars, and pictures the now-empty river filled with bobbing sailboats and row boats and yachts and kayaks as the Boston Symphony Orchestra strikes up the opening bars of the _1812 Overture_.

He walks around for a bit taking snapshots for Bitty with his phone, then finds a bench near the sparsely-populated playground and pulls out his book. Since finishing the Olmsted biography he’s working steadily through Rybczynski’s back catalog and just last night began _Home: A Short History of an Idea_. Two chapters -- and a few text exchanges with Bitty later -- his phone buzzes and it’s a profanity-filled text Shitty announcing his arrival in Boston. Or, at least, that’s what Jack gets out of Shitty’s righteous denunciation of the driving abilities of all _goddamn motherfucking Masshole drivers without a shred of common decency among them_. Jack raises an eyebrow at the phone and texts back, _As I recall you think turn signals “are for wusses”_.

 _Jack, my man, where are you?_ Shitty responds, choosing to ignore Jack’s critique of his driving abilities.

 _Down by the Hatch. I can be at Emmet’s in fifteen._ Jack slides his book back in his bag and stands up to walk back toward Beacon Hill.

* * *

Shitty’s already secured them a table at the back of the restaurant when Jack ducks through the low doorway into Emmet’s, and has clearly been watching for Jack because he shoots up a lanky arm before Jack’s eyes have even fully adjusted to the dim of the interior.

“It’s -- I’m meeting a friend,” he says to the hostess, nodding toward Shitty.

“Enjoy your lunch!” she says with a smile as he sidles past the bar and a table over-full of suits having some sort of business lunch and makes his way to the back.

“Hey Shits,” Jack greets Shitty, taking in at a glance the look Shitty’s chosen for today. Shitty, more than any of Jack’s (admittedly small number of) friends, uses clothing -- or lack thereof -- as a form of communication. Today’s message involves a pair of cargo shorts Shitty’s had since their Sophomore year and a t-shirt from Lardo’s freshman-year performance of _The Vagina Monologues_ which means that Shitty is feeling both nostalgic and in the mood to piss his father and stepmother off. Even if only for the five minutes he sees them between getting out of the shower and leaving the house.

He’s already nursing a beer which Jack raises a pointed eyebrow at.

“Not driving back until tonight, man,” Shitty says. “Lardo and I have a thing.”

“A thing, huh?” Jack realizes this probably adds an added layer of messaging to the t-shirt Shitty is wearing.

“Some sort of jam session-slash-poetry-night at Fazenda that one of her friends from Samwell is in? I gather we’re going as moral support.”

“Have fun, be safe, call me when you get home,” Jack smirks, just to make Shitty reach across the table and smack him on the side of the head.

They’re interrupted by the waiter who takes their order -- Jack gets the shepherd’s pie and Shitty orders fish and chips like he always does when it’s on the menu -- and then Jack has a moment of panic like he always does when faced with a single other person he’s responsible for making conversation with.

“So, brah, like, I’m curious,” Shitty says, hunching forward, and Jack remembers with Shitty he never needs to worry about carrying the conversation forward past awkward silences. “What’s it like?”

Jack’s mind goes to the condoms and lube in his bag and he stares at Shitty blankly for a moment. “Uh.”

Shitty makes a complicated gesture over the pint glass, indicating Jack’s presence at the table. “Having this whole grown-up thing, you know, worked out.”

Jack understands underneath Shitty’s posturing that it’s a serious question so he takes a moment to consider a serious answer. “I, uh, wouldn’t say I have it all worked out.”

“C’mon, man. You’ve got a job that pays six figures, your own apartment, a boyfriend,” Shitty turns his beer on the coaster, takes another sip. “You’re getting paid six figures to do what you _love_ man. What does that feel like? To know what you want and then, you know, to achieve it?”

Coming from anyone else, Jack thinks he would probably be offended. But it’s Shitty so he just says, mildly, “It’s not like that. You know it’s not like that.”

Shitty sighs. “I had a fight with my old man last night. He still thinks I should have gone into finance. Fucking _finance_. I can’t believe I get into Harvard fucking Law and he still finds ways to imply that I’m not the son he would have hoped for.”

Jack takes a sip of his iced tea. “I’m sorry man.” He thinks about what it would be like if his father hadn’t wanted him to go into professional sports, or had wanted him to go into a _different_ sport. Eric and his dad seem be wrestling with this, too, although in a much less combative fashion than Shitty and his father.

Shitty shrugs. “I’ve been in school for sixteen fucking years, Jack, straight through without a break, you know? And, like, part of me is still goddamn proud to have gotten into law school but part of me is scared I’ve done it just to prove to my father I can go to Harvard and not turn out like _him_.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “But what if I do turn out like him?”

Jack understands this, a little. Like Shitty he’s in a weird liminal space this summer: his future laid out before him but not actually _begun_. And in the hours of free time he has between working out and all the other activities he’s found to fill his summer days Jack finds himself wondering when he actually _decided_ to go pro.

And he can’t actually remember.

Hockey, as a game, he keeps coming back to. He never gets tired of lacing up his skates and getting out on the ice with the other guys on his team. He loved it in the Q, he loved it with the kids he coached, he loved it at Samwell, and he’s been growing ever-more comfortable with the Falconers he’s been skating with every time they share the ice.

But the decision to make hockey his _job_? It’s been troubling him, lately, that he can’t explain to himself how and why that happened. It’s on the mental list of things to talk to Marci about. But it’s also all very theoretical when his first professional season hasn’t even properly started.

Which puts him in a very similar position to the one Shitty’s in.

“I get it,” he says, leaning back as the waiter returns with their food. “It all feels a bit like … like another summer break right now, eh? When August comes and we don’t move back into the Haus … I think that’s when it will really start to feel weird.”

“Bits is coming to visit you in August, right?” Shitty asks as he pours salt and vinegar on his chips.

“He finishes at Camp on the first of August,” Jack affirms, “and he’s flying in on the second.” Bitty had been alarmingly happy when he realized that with his flight rescheduled he would be in Pawtucket for Jack’s birthday. “You and Lardo should come down -- we could all hang out.”

“You don’t think that would be awkward?”

Jack frowns at Shitty, “No, why?”

Shitty rolls his eyes. “Dude. You and Bits spent all last semester in _serious_ sexual deprivation mode. I am not getting anywhere near the fine state of Rhode Island while he’s staying with you for fear of spontaneous impregnation.”

Jack snorts. “I don’t think it works like that.”

“Well I’m not taking any chances.”

“Fine. We’ll just have to come to Boston then. When are you moving to Somerville?”

Shitty licks the grease from the fish off his fingers. “Lease starts August 15. I scored this place off a guy who’s subletting because he’s on a Fulbright to Egypt all next year. Lardo says she’ll help me with temporary decorations.”

Jack wonders what version of this story he’ll get from Lardo when they have lunch the day after tomorrow. He’s spent three years, now, watching the two of them bounce off each other and he only knows it’s complicated.

“I’ll look forward to that,” is all he says for the moment, “when Bitty and I come up for a visit.”

"I'll be holding you to that," Shitty says, saluting Jack with his nearly-empty pint.

"I expect you to," Jack says firmly. He may have less of a grip on adulthood than Shitty imagines, but he does know that whatever happens in the coming year, he doesn't want to lose Shitty as a friend. Shitty's been there when Jack's needed him in the past and -- Jack files this whole conversation away for later contemplation; maybe Bitty will have some insights -- now Jack has an inkling that it might just be time to return the favor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for your patience, y'all. For those who missed it on Twitter, I had an almost-migraine last night so couldn't write. This is yesterday's chapter and I'm probably going to remain a day behind until Sunday, when I will have the time to write two chapters back-to-back. 
> 
> As an update, I've decided to complete this story up on Tuesday, July 5th. The original challenge/prompt was to write the days of their separation between May 18th and July 3rd -- but of course I want to write a couple of days during which they're actually in the same location! So I'll be writing 49 chapters in all.
> 
> I made Jack's therapist, Marci, who is very much fictional, work at [Fenway Health](http://www.fenwayhealth.org/) which is our amazing LGBTQ-focused community health center here in Boston.
> 
> The [Make Way For Ducklings statue](http://www.publicartboston.com/content/make-way-ducklings-duckling-sculpture) in the Public Garden.
> 
> For [the rest of Jack's photos see this Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/feministlib/status/748935947161665536).
> 
> The Boston Pops [has a concert on the Esplanade](http://bostonpopsjuly4th.org/) every year, which some of you may have heard of. They traditionally end with the _1812 Overture_ including cannon fire!
> 
> I've given Jack my sometime obsession with urban history and urban planning, and set him to reading [Witold Rybczynski](http://www.witoldrybczynski.com/books/). 
> 
> Lardo's friend's thing is at [Fazenda Cafe](http://www.yelp.com/biz/fazenda-cafe-jamaica-plain) near Forest Hills.
> 
> [Emmet's Irish Pub and Restaurant](http://emmetsirishpubandrestaurant.com/) does a very tasty shepherd's pie. Good choice there, Jack.


	45. Wednesday, 1 July 2015

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [@helenstwin on Twitter](https://twitter.com/helenstwin/status/748918917226110978) for the Canada Day suggestions!

!!!

_Good morning Bitty._

Happy Canada Day!!!  
What are you going to do?

_Have poutine for breakfast._

  
Now you’re just making fun of me

LOL did you see this?  
<https://twitter.com/NickBossRoss/status/748904843801010176/photo/1>

_Haha._

But seriously, shouldn’t you do something for Canada Day?  
I mean, like if you were home would there be fireworks?

 _Mmm. Maybe._  
_Sometimes my parents would host a picnic._  
_Mom always made us watch Jaws on the 4th of July._

We could do that!

_Might be fun._

Did you see Ransom and Holster are at Niagara Falls?  
They’re posting pictures on the Facebook page

They bought red and white face paint and painted each other’s torsos with the Canadian flag  
Holster claims Ransom is teaching random tourists the lyrics to “O Canada”  


_Can I see the pictures if I don’t have Facebook?_

_That actually reminds me._  
_I wanted to ask._  
_Is there a way for me to join Facebook without anyone knowing?_

Hold on … I’ll download the picture and share it with you  
Via text

...without anyone knowing…???

 _I mean, you guys seem to share stuff on the team Facebook page._  
_I want to be able to see it, and I was thinking maybe share photos and stuff._  
_But I don’t want people to be able to FIND me?_  
_Like, old teammates from the Q._  
_Or hockey fans._

OH  
I see what you’re saying  
Um  
Hold on

(It would be cool to have you on Facebook!)  
(Chowder was just asking about you yesterday!)

_He talks to me in the group text?_

Oh, yeah, I know   
But he’s on Facebook a lot more  
I think he and Cait use messenger like  
24/7

And Johnson pops up every few days with something random

 _It would be nice to talk with Johnson again._  
_I use “talk” loosely you understand._

Okay, yes.  
So there’s good news and there’s bad news.  
Which do you want first?

_Bad news._

So the bad news is that we can’t set you up to be “unfindable”  
You need to use your real name  
And someone searching your name would find your account  
(Along with, like, all the fake accounts set up by fans? That’s … a little creepy. Ugh)

_This is probably the point in our relationship where I tell you that if you search for my name on the Internet you will find porn._

Why Mr. Zimmermann!  
You don’t say

 _I’m serious Bits._  
_Just … search with care. Is what I’m saying._  
_If you’re looking for stuff related to me._

Honey, you are so sweet  
Thinking you had to tell me that  


_Do I want to know?_

Probably not  
I mean, I haven’t gone LOOKING if that’s what you’re worried about  
That would have been...weird?  
But I do know it exists  
I mean, that’s the rule

_The rule?_

If it’s a cherished childhood memory someone’s written porn about it

 _Wait, are you saying I’m a cherished childhood memory?_  
_I’m confused._

Sigh  
We’ll talk about it when you’re here  
*hugs*  
  
In the meantime, what I was saying is  
We can make you a Facebook account but it doesn’t have to have your picture or anything  
And YOU get to control who you give access to anything on your page  
And the SMH page is locked so only players and alums have access  
So anything you posted there would be like posting to the team text  
Well, with alumni too

 _Okay, that sounds good._  
_Will you help me set up an account when I’m visiting?_

 _Thanks for the picture of Ransom and Holster._  
_Haha._

Sure!  
It'll be easy  
  
Holster says they’re going to do it again on the 4th and pretend it’s Canada Day all over again  
See how many tourists they can confuse

_Does Holster even know the words to our national anthem?_

Ransom taught him  
Apparently, whatever incentives Rans uses are powerful ones  


_I never would have guessed._

Right?  
I mean, I’m not placing bets but  
Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck…

_I believe you mean *Canada goose*._

Oh, hush, that’s terrible  


So why the sudden urge to join Facebook?

 _It’s not entirely sudden._  
_I’ve been thinking about it since May._  
_I don’t want to be one of those alums who just disappears, you know?_  
_I mean, I won’t because of you._  
_But I should stay in touch with the others too._  
_And now I’m not living there that probably means social media._  
_Sigh._

You make it sound so painful!

_I’m sure you’ve noticed that “social” and “media” are not things I generally enjoy._

Fair enough

 _But I had lunch with Shitty yesterday._  
_I’m worried about him._  
_I thought...maybe if I could keep a closer eye on him…_

???

 _He just doesn’t seem happy._  
_And I’m worried about the drinking._  
_I mean, I’ve always been worried about the drinking but._

Okay  
I mean, I haven’t noticed anything but  
Well, there was that day he messaged me while high  
I thought it was just Shitty joking  
  
  
Now I’m worried

 _The more Shitty jokes, the more you have to pay attention to what he's NOT saying._  
_He’s carrying a lot of pain around that he doesn’t share with many people._

Do you think Lardo knows?

 _I’m not sure._  
_I’m gonna see her tomorrow and I’ll try and ask._

_Anyway. I thought if I was on Facebook maybe I’d be able to see is this is part of a pattern._

You know  
Señor Bunny heard you say “tomorrow” and he perked right up

_Did he now._

Well, I mean, I’ve explained to him that tomorrow you and Monsieur Éléphant will be going to Boston so you can catch a plane down to Atlanta where he and I get to meet you at the airport  


_Ah._  
_Well, you can tell Señor Bunny he’s not the only excited one._  
_Monsieur Éléphant has been having trouble sleeping, in fact._  
_Thinking about how soon we’ll be seeing you._

...he has?

_Mmm. Yes._

Oh  


_I’ve had to cuddle him, at night, so he can sleep.  
It helps him feel less alone._

How can he possibly miss Señor Bunny this much?  
I mean, he hasn’t even MET Señor Bunny  
Except over Skype

 _You get to know a lot about a person over Skype._  
_And text._  
_And over the phone._

Well, yes  


Jack?

_Yes Bits?_

You can tell Monsieur Éléphant I understand how he feels  
I miss you and I love you  
AND I CANNOT WAIT TO SEE YOU IN LESS THAN 48 HOURS

 _Me too._  
_I love you and I miss you._  
_And it’s getting harder and harder to wait._

I’ll be there at the airport waiting  
… Jack?

_?_

Would you feel weird if I kissed you?  
I mean, at the airport  
I mean, I know it’s a public space and  
There’s a chance someone would recognize you and

 _No._  
_No, I wouldn’t feel weird about that._  
_At all._


	46. Thursday, 2 July 2015

Jack has spent so much of his life living out of a suitcase that he has packing down to a science. He gets up on Thursday morning, goes for a run, showers, and then puts his battered carry-on suitcase on the bed and unzips the cover. He has everything neatly packed for the week ahead inside of fifteen minutes. After that, it’s a matter of doing one last round of his apartment to make sure all the lights and appliances are turned off and he’s out the door.

According to the directions on his phone, it’s only an hour from Pawtucket up to Logan Airport but it’s a weekday and Jack’s stupidly chosen to drive north with all the Boston commuters headed into the city for what will probably -- for many of them -- be their last day of work before the long weekend. When he merges onto I-93 toward Boston the traffic slows to a crawl and Jack has plenty of time with his own thoughts as he creeps up through Quincy and Dorchester.

He realizes, drumming his fingers on the wheel and listening to a story about the Greek debt crisis, that this is the first time he’s gone on a trip simply because he wanted to. Jack’s led a well-traveled life -- sometimes, he thinks, exhaustingly so. The reading he’s been doing the last few weeks, about landscape design and urban planning and architecture, is making him remember what he said to Bitty back in May -- that he’s never really lived in any specific _place_ that felt like home.

He knows his mother feels most at home in Wellfleet, the summer home of her childhood, and Jack’s inherited some of that nostalgia from her. It’s also -- to be the summer home of his own childhood, a place where he continues to feel welcome and at peace. He feels like a native in Montréal -- the city continues to be his measure of what a city _ought_ to be -- but his parents have owned several residences there, over the last three decades, and none of those has ever felt like a place Jack would call home. For one thing, he probably lived longer in the apartment they rented in Pittsburgh, when his father was still playing for the Penguins, than he has any of the houses they owned in Montréal -- even if he doesn’t remember it much because he was only seven when his father retired. After that, his parents had indulged their wanderlust and it had been rare for them to spend more than a month or two at home before coming up with an excuse to go somewhere new or return to a favorite locale.

Everything had felt anxiously impermanent to Jack as a child -- he remembers waking up in the middle of the night in a strange hotel room, disoriented, already halfway through taking inventory of the things he needed to keep track of. It wasn’t that his parents needed looking after -- they were efficient, practiced travelers who were as meticulous about details as they were willing to roll with last-minutes changes.

But where Alicia and Bob thrived on novelty, Jack craved familiarity and routine. He’d found it, in part, in hockey -- because regardless of where he was, when he stepped on the ice he knew the rules he was playing by. And he’d found it, eventually, at Samwell where he’d been able to return each fall to the same spaces, the rhythm of coursework, the Haus with its chaotic and colorful inhabitants who -- nonetheless -- gave him the feeling he was one of them, no matter that they never knew quite what to make of him.

Jack’s been so grateful, amidst all of this, for the rare stretches of time when he gets to stay that he’s never felt any particular need to make excuses to travel elsewhere. He thinks about Holster and Ransom and their annual Niagara Falls reunion; he thinks about their road trip out to Yellowstone. He wonders if Bitty’s ever been abroad. Jack’s passport, last renewed in 2008, is filled with stamps and scribbled notations. He wonders what it would be like to never traveled outside the country you were born in, and whether Bitty wants to explore other parts of the world.

Jack can’t actually think of a place, right now, that he’d like to explore. He likes Massachusetts, and Pawtucket feels manageable and worn around the edges. And it’s close enough to the familiar: Samwell, Boston, the Cape. He doesn’t have to pack a suitcase or book a hotel room to find someone who remembers him in diapers.

Maybe his parents would think he’s not being ambitious enough, but to Jack that’s a comforting thought.

He wonders, as he merges onto I-90 toward South Boston and the airport, if Bitty is going to expect him to do touristy things down in Georgia. Mostly, Jack just wants to get to where Eric is and never, ever leave because already wherever Bitty is feels like home.

* * *

When Jack emerges from the T station, having parked at the airport and taken the Blue Line to State Street, the North End is bustling with foot traffic both local and gawking tourist. Jack ducks into Polcari’s on the heels of some sort of walking tour, a dozen people crowding into the shop so the tour guide can talk about olive oil and polenta, and let the proprietor give his elevator pitch for their coffee and spices. Jack edges around the cluster of tourists and bends down in search of the cat, who looks up from her nap under the bin of lentils and yawns at him. He reaches out to let her sniff his hand.

She quivers a whisker at him and then tucks her head back under her paw, a clear indication he’s less interesting than her mid-morning nap.

Jack pulls out his phone and takes a few pictures of the bins of bulk goods lining the narrow aisle and the floor-to-ceiling shelves behind the counter with their neatly-labeled glass jars of coffee beans and loose tea. There are two elderly women who’ve come in to make purchases and, as the tourists file back out in the wake of their guide, the guy behind the counter chats with them as he weighs their orders and rings them up on the massive manual register that sits at the end of the counter. They’re clearly regulars and Jack thinks again about being in a place long enough that people recognize you at the stores where you shop -- and not because they remember your dad’s _Sports Illustrated_ spread from the third time his team won the Stanley Cup.

Or, he thinks with an inward sigh, because they’re following the Falconers and recognize you from the awkward post-game interviews.

“And what can I help _you_ with,” the shopkeeper asks as Jack reaches the front of the line.

“I’d like -- uh -- can you show me how much four ounces of cinnamon is?” Jack realizes the spices are sold by weight and he has no conception of what is a reasonable amount of cinnamon. Particularly when it comes to anyone from the Bittle family.

“Sure thing,” the guy responds, reaching over the display to pull out the jar of ground cinnamon. It turns out there isn’t enough in the jar for four ounces and the man disappears into the back storeroom in search of more.

“They have the _best_ cinnamon here,” the woman standing next to Jack in the informal queue offers conspiratorily.

“So I’m told,” Jack says. And then offers, entirely to his own surprise, “it’s actually for my boyfriend’s mother. I’m visiting them in Georgia this weekend.”

The woman nods, unfazed, and pats him on the arm. “That’s a good boy, taking a hostess gift. Is she a baker?”

They’re interrupted by the reemergence of the clerk from the back of the shop with a jar re-filled with the most aromatic cinnamon Jack can ever recall smelling. And that’s saying something after his year living with Eric.

“Fresh ground for ya,” the shopkeeper says, using a small brass scoop to measure out a small mound of spice on the scale. “Now that’s … just a tad over four ounces.”

“Could you make it eight?” Jack asks, and then, “...and then another eight? In a separate bag?” He’ll buy some now and keep it at his apartment for when Bitty moves up in August.

 _Visits._ When Bitty _visits_ in August.

* * *

Jack and Lardo meet up just after noon at the Roxie’s food truck parked at the Christian Science Plaza.

“Hey Jack!” Lardo puts out a fist in greeting and Jack bumps his knuckles to hers, taking in the asymmetrical haircut she’s sporting -- new since the weekend she and Shitty had come down to Pawtucket -- and wonders if the haircut is commentary on the tailored dress and heels she’s wearing. It’s an outfit that wouldn’t look out of place on his mother when she’s meeting with a potential event sponsor.

“How’s it going, Lardo?”

“Meh,” she wavers the hand she used to greet him, attention already wandering to the day’s menu posted on the side of the truck. “It is what it is. Maris is off to Kennebunkport tomorrow and she’s actually put me in charge of the gallery until Wednesday.” She tries to sound disaffected by the entire enterprise but Jack can tell she’s pleased.

“Congratulations!”

She rolls her eyes, but can’t hide the grin. “Yeah, thanks. Hey, tell your mom thanks again for the introduction, yeah?”

“You probably talk to her more than I do -- I hear from Bitty she hangs out with all the cool kids on Twitter.”

“Your parents on Twitter are, like, kind of hilarious Jack.”

“Which is part of the reason I will never have a Twitter account.”

“Yeah, that’s what I said two years ago when Holster told me I needed one. Ten thousand Tweets later…”

They place their order and then step off to the side and check their phones while they wait for the sandwiches to come off the grille. Food in hand, they pick their way around the other waiting customers and find a seat in the shade under the trees that ring the fountain on the near end of the long reflecting pool. Kids of all sizes -- and even a few adults -- are playing in the spray, leaping about in swimsuits and even just wet clothes.

“How was the thing with Shitty on Tuesday” Jack asks, around bites of his fontina-and-heirloom tomato-on-sourdough sandwich.

Her mouth full, Lardo nods an exaggerated, positive response before swallowing and saying, “Amanda was happy with it, yeah! They had a good crowd. She and Mark were doing a cycle of poems he accompanied on the bongo drums. It was pretty rad.”

“That’s … cool,” is all Jack really feels qualified to offer.

Lardo just laughs, “You don’t have to pretend you’re into it, Mr. Hockey. But it was pretty cool. Amanda has these letters her great-grandparents wrote, in Norwegian, when her great-grandfather first emigrated to New York and he was working in a factory trying to earn enough money to send for her -- they were already married, but only just -- like, almost a mail order bride situation? Amanda’s been translating them and, like, building a cycle of poems around them interwoven with passages from some of the Norse epics.”

“That’s called, what, found poetry?” Jack asks.

“Hey, you _were_ listening to Nursey last year!”

Jack isn’t sure how to ask what he wants to ask, so he just dives right in and says, “So how did Shitty seem to you?”

Lardo gives him a sideways look as she inhales the last bite of her sandwich and wipes her hands on the crumpled napkin.

"You had lunch with him that day, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. He seemed … pissed off. He was trying to get a rise out of me, like he does when he’s --”

“-- in a bad headspace, yeah,” Lardo sighs. “I could tell.”

“So he didn’t…?”

“Tell me anything? When does Shitty ever fucking tell me --” she breaks off and sighs, shaking her head. “I’m not being fair. I just --” she stops, looking down at the twisted wad of napkin in her hands, and sighs again.

Jack thinks about what Marci would do in a situation like this and waits.

Lardo squints out into the sunlight of the plaza, where the glare of the sun off the water makes the air almost too bright to look at, even through sunglasses.

“When I was in Kenya we used to have these _amazing_ conversations about art history and gender theory and law and global politics … it was ‘swawesome, you know? And I thought -- I thought -- but when I came back to Samwell in January … we were still _bros_ and all but he stopped …” she trails off with a frown and a shrug.

Jack considers what he can and can’t tell one of his best friends about another best friend who are themselves friends. “During our frog year, Shitty used to drive me crazy. I mean, I was a different person then too but I thought, ‘Who the fuck is this kid and how the hell did he end up on my hockey team,’ because he seemed to spend all his time fucking around the Haus high or drunk or both, right?”

“Right.” Lardo slips her feet out of her shoes and kicks her toes up into the air, stretching her hamstrings.

“I think that’s Shitty trying to prove to himself that none of what he actually cares about matters,” Jack says, realizing the truth of it as he puts it into words. “Not all of it. Shits is always going to throw a good party, but -- sometimes there’s an edge to it. And there’s an edge to it when he’s trying to pretend he doesn’t care.” Jack collects their refuse and stands up to walk it over to the nearest rubbish bin. “I’ve been there. It’s … not a good feeling.”

Lardo reaches up and lets Jack pull her back to her feet so she can slip her shoes back on. They start walking up Belvidere Street toward Dalton Street where they can cut across to Newbery and get Lardo back to the gallery before the end of her lunch break.

“I can’t believe I’m asking you for relationship advice,” Lardo says, poking Jack in the ribs. “But, so, how do I get him to talk to me again?”

Jack considers. “It’s not so much about talking as it is ... “ He trails off, considering the version of Shitty he saw at the pub on Tuesday. What Shitty had told him. What Lardo had just told him. What he knows about Shits after three years of living with him. “I think he’s _lonely_. It’s my fault, eh? Summers are always hard for him and I should have known this was going to be harder than most. Instead I’ve been -- Bits and I have been --”

Lardo grins, “Don’t you _dare_ apologize for being in love, Jack Zimmermann. If nothing else, you saved my ass from a whole year of living across from Bitty _pining_.”

Jack flushes. “He wouldn’t have --”

“He totally would have. Dude, he has it _so bad_ for you.”

Jack grins in spite of himself. “Well,” he says. “Anyway. I should have been paying better attention. I promise to do better.”

“Hey, maybe when you get back from Madison we could come down for another weekend? Do another _Sense8_ marathon? Or go visit Shits in Hyannis?” She makes a face. “God, his step-mother hates me.”

Jack nudges her shoulder, “Hey, that’s probably a good thing from Shitty’s perspective, right?”

Lardo laughs, “Point. Okay. Let’s do this thing.”

“Game on?”

“Game on.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Where did this Shitty subplot come from?? I blame Sun with whom I was talking yesterday about Shitty and his moods.
> 
> Some [location photos for this chapter](https://twitter.com/feministlib/status/749657272532537345) courtesy of my habit of snapping pictures while I'm running errands.
> 
> NPR's Morning Edition [for 2 July 2015](http://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/2015/07/02/419383151) did have a story about the Greek debt crisis.
> 
> [Polcari's Coffee](http://polcariscoffee.com).
> 
> I've never actually had a grilled cheese sandwich from [Roxy's](http://www.roxysgrilledcheese.com/) but have friends for whom their food truck is destination dining. I don't think the Christian Science Plaza is one of their regular stops (I see them more often by the Boston Public Library) but the Plaza does host a regular rotation of other vendors in the location I describe.
> 
> Unfamiliar with Boston? Here's the write-up about the [Christian Science Plaza](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Church_of_Christ,_Scientist) which I think is one of the more stunning (in a good way) juxtapositions of architecture in central Boston.


	47. Friday, 3 July 2015

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been reading your comments all day, even though I've been busy writing, and you are all lovely people. It's been such a delight to hear what specific parts of the story speak to each of you. I have never had such an interactive writing experience and really cherish each and every reaction! #BestReadersAreBest

In the end, Eric doesn’t see Jack until Jack is almost upon him. He’s been hovering in the arrivals lobby at Hartsfield-Jackson for nearly three hours because he hadn’t been able to sleep the night before. After a few hours of pretending to sleep Eric had finally gotten up stupidly early, made himself a thermos of coffee, and driven into Atlanta because he couldn't stop worrying about being late.

Which meant, of course, that the rush hour traffic was particularly light on the Friday of a holiday weekend and he’d wound up at the airport nearly two hours ahead of when Jack’s flight was supposed to arrive. And then Jack’s flight from Logan had been delayed for almost an hour. So Eric’s finished a thermos of coffee and is halfway through a (really quite horribly pulled) venti iced caramel macchiato from the terminal Starbucks by the time the Boston flight registers as landed on the ARRIVALS monitors and he feels like he’s going to expire from the anticipation that will _just not fucking end already_.

He’s pulled his phone out to reassure himself, once again, that he had in fact texted Jack to let him know where to look for him when he hears “Hey. Bitty.” And there’s Jack pulling his carry-on with his shoulder bag slung over his shoulder looking scrubbed and awake and _oh God_ so overwhelmingly _there_.

“Hi,” Eric says, blankly. “Hey! You made it!”

Like an idiot. Stating the obvious.

“Yeah, sorry about the delay,” Jack shrugs. “Something about a faulty light on the wing that needed --”

Eric suddenly, rather desperately, wishes he didn’t have a coffee in one hand and his phone in the other. So he pockets the phone and takes two steps to the left in order to drop his macchiato in the nearest trash bin -- he’s had more than enough caffeine already, anyway -- before closing the distance between himself and Jack. He reaches up to slide a hand around the back of Jack’s neck and pulls him down into a kiss.

In his head -- despite fantasies of flinging himself into Jack’s arms like Martine McCutcheon had leapt upon Hugh Grant in _Love Actually_ \-- Eric had meant to give Jack a rather chaste welcome-to-Georgia kiss. They’re standing in the middle of a busy airport, after all, and even if Jack’s said this is okay Eric is hyper-aware that kissing Jack in public is an undeniable statement about the nature of their relationship.

Which is, of course, precisely why Eric wants to do it. (Also because he’s been fantasizing about kissing Jack again since roughly three seconds after Jack let go of him on graduation day and disappeared back down the Haus stairs.) Eric wants everyone currently flooding past them on their way to the taxi stand and SkyTrain and the parking lot to understand that this beautiful man standing in front of him is Eric’s _boyfriend_ and if that makes them fucking uncomfortable that is _their_ problem not his.

But still. They're in public and Eric's aware that, gay or straight couple aside, there are expectations of propriety to be respected. Except, it seems Jack has a different concept of propriety. And really, really meant it when he said he had no objection to Eric kissing him in public. Because Jack leans full-body into the kiss with a deep hum of approval that Eric feels against his own palms. He lets go of his suitcase handle to slide both hands around Eric’s waist to the small of his back. And Eric, without making the decision intentionally, feels himself melt into Jack like there is no other time or place more appropriate for getting _closer_.

After that, things quickly become less than chaste. If still technically within the bounds of social propriety. They’re both fully clothed, after all, and Eric is only _pressing rather firmly_ rather than _shamelessly grinding_ himself against Jack where Jack has him pulled flush against the front of Jack’s jeans.

Their first private kisses had been tentative, if unequivocal. Jack’s damp and trembling hand had been gentle against Eric’s jaw and Eric -- one hand still holding his phone with its headphones dangling -- had been too stunned to do more than clutch disbelievingly at the polyester folds of Jack’s graduation robe and chase down the next kiss, and the next, and the next.

This, by contrast, is a startling moment of raw public intimacy. What had started out as a simple greeting quickly turns into something more complex as Jack smiles happily against Eric’s mouth and flicks out a tongue to trace the curve of Eric’s lower lip, pushing Eric’s mouth open until he has the fullness of Eric’s bottom lip between his own. He sucks, and nips, the pressure and pull engaging parts of Eric’s body that make him laugh against Jack’s mouth with the giddy pleasure of having Jack _here_ and so patently wanting as much and as deeply as Eric himself.

Made bold by example, Eric mimics Jack’s mouth, pulling Jack’s lip between his teeth briefly and nipping down ever so slightly. Jack exhales a soft, startled rush of air and pulls back to check something in Eric’s expression -- then leans in again to press another kiss to Eric’s lips like he can’t bring himself to be any further away than _this close._

Eric _completely_ understand the sentiment.

“Well, hi there,” he whispers, feeling the happiness and rightness that is _Jack Jack Jack right here right here right here in his arms_ singing through his over-caffeinated veins.

“Hi,” Jack whispers back, nosing against Eric’s cheek, pressing tiny, teasing kisses across his cheek to his ear and _O_ _h_ , Eric shivers and turns his head to grant Jack better access, now isn’t _that_ an interesting sensation ...

“Jack, we should --”

“Hey, Bits, it’s okay --” Jack pulls back again so he can focus on Eric’s face. “I meant it when I said --”

“Well, _yeah_ ,” Eric says, feeling his cheeks heat with a heady mixture of desire and self-consciousness, “I'm getting that but -- the things I want to do, we can’t really do in public, you know?” He pushes up onto his toes and presses one last kiss _just because he can_ on Jack’s mouth, then reluctantly pulls his hands away from Jack’s neck, sliding his palms down over the front of Jack’s worn button down shirt.

His traitorous mind points out how easy it would be to unbutton those buttons one by one and -- well, yes. That. With a fingertip, he circles one of the buttons against Jack’s sternum and watches Jack swallow and lick his lips in response.

Eric feels a knot of anxiety he hadn’t been fully aware of carrying loosen and fall away. They’re really doing this. Jack really wants him. Touching Jack really _is_ easier than constantly reminding himself that he's not allowed to touch.

He  _is_ allowed to touch, now. And here's Jack touching him back. 

“Let’s, um -- do you have a checked bag?” 

“Nope, just this,” Jack puts a hand back on the handle of his carry-on. “I travel light.”

“Okay, right, well -- I’m parked out in the garage, so just this way --” Eric points in the relevant direction and when he drops his hand again Jack catches it. He interlaces their fingers like it’s the most natural thing in the world, like they’ve been walking hand-in-hand across campus all year. And somehow that feels even more conspicuous than being wrapped in Jack’s arms.

He squeezes Jack’s hand and gets a squeeze in response.

As they cross the atrium Eric leans into Jack’s shoulder and murmurs, “I’m glad you’re here.”

Jack bends toward him and presses a kiss to Eric’s temple, “Me too, Bits. Me too.”

And they walk out into the wider world together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've only flown _through_ Atlanta once, many years ago, so the descriptions are loosely based on the [terminal map](http://www.atlanta-airport.com/docs/terminal/DomesticTerminal.pdf) and Google street view. All errors are my own!
> 
> For those of you who haven't seen or don't remember _Love Actually_ that well, [the David and Natalie story line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Actually#David_and_Natalie) ends with [this kiss](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK5918KpRs0) (YouTube).


	48. Saturday, 4 July 2015

The morning of the 4th, Jack wakes up to find a warm and mostly-naked Eric Bittle sleeping under the protective curve of his arm. His need to pee is going to become critical shortly, but as the dawn light filters into Eric’s childhood bedroom Jack just wants to lay still and let this particular moment sink into his bones.

Jack realizes, laying there, that despite the pressure from his bladder he actually feels utterly at rest. He’d thought, upon first waking, that there was something about the quality of air or the sounds in an unfamiliar house that had pulled him from sleep. But instead what’s surprised him into wakefulness is the fact that he’s comfortable where he is, disinclined to get up and go out for a run or get a start on the day’s activities. It’s an utterly alien absence of the restlessness that usually dogs Jack’s waking moments, something he has to continually work to keep at bay.

This -- stretched out with Eric's head tucked under Jack’s chin, his hair tickling Jack’s nose -- is, in fact, the only activity Jack’s sleepy, contented mind considers worthy of consideration.

oOo

_“...and this is the guest bedroom,” Eric says, turning the knob on the door next to the bathroom and pushing into the room. There’s a ceiling fan whirring above their heads and a neatly-made bed with a cotton bedspread turned down and a stack of towels stacked on the end. The sewing table in one corner and the shelves across from the bed stacked high with pattern books, fabric, and other supplies betray the room’s dual-purpose._

_Eric hangs back in the doorway as Jack lifts his suitcase over the rag rug that covers the bare floorboards and drops it at the foot of the bed next to the stack of towels. He unzips the suitcase and digs out Monsieur Éléphant from underneath his toiletries kit._

_He sits down on the edge of the bed and holds up Monsieur Éléphant, making him nod slightly at Bitty who’s still watching him from a good six feet away._

_“Monsieur Éléphant approves but asks what you’re doing all the way over there.”_

_Eric rolls his eyes but does step into the bedroom. “You can explain to Monsieur Éléphant that my parents are expecting us to join them for lunch in just a few minutes.”_

_“There’s a lot can happen in just a few minutes,” Jack points out. He puts out his free hand to reel Bitty in between his knees, still marveling at the fact that it’s really this easy -- that he puts out a hand and there Eric is, letting Jack reach out to catch and hold him._

_He settles his hands on Eric’s hips as Eric leans in to steal a kiss. “Don’t you think that I dragged you all the way down here to Georgia just to steal a few kisses here and there Mr. Zimmermann,” Eric says against Jack’s lips. “Maybe -- maybe I was standing over by the doorway because I don’t trust myself to make it to lunch if I come any closer.”_

_Jack’s fingers dig into the flesh of Bitty’s thighs as he returns Bitty’s kisses and tastes the harsh aftertaste of the macchiato, the salty sweat on Bitty’s upper lip, absence of liquor on their tongues. He’s had time to worry, in the intervening weeks, that the awkward rightness of kissing Eric had been some sort of fluke -- a lucky shot that just happened to bounce off the post into the net. But every time they’ve made contact (and, truthfully, they’ve rarely stopped touching) since Eric reached for him in the airport all his body says is_ yes yes yes _._

_“I -- I could live with that,” Jack says, breathlessly, as Eric slides a knee up onto the bed and leans in closer._

oOo

When Jack returns from the bathroom, Eric is awake and blinking the sleep out of his eyes. Jack slides back under the sheet, bending down to kiss him good morning.

_Easy._

“Morning, Bittle.”

“Good morning Mr. Zimmermann,” Eric grins up at Jack, reaching up to run his fingers through the hair at the back of Jack’s scalp. His fingers are confident, now, and as he fists his hand and tugs, gently, Jack lets his eyes fall shut and _mmms_ his approval.

“You’re gonna have to be careful not to call me that in public, Bits, if you insist on molesting me on a regular basis.”

“I didn’t hear you complaining yesterday, _Mr. Zimmermann_.”

“You don’t hear me complaining now.” Jack slides a palm down Eric’s chest, where a fine dusting of blond hair trails downward and gathers with an intriguing admixture of auburn at his groin. “But your mother can’t be the only one in this town who remembers my dad and who might put two-and-two together.”

“So how’m I supposed to introduce you, then? People _will_ notice if you have no last name.”

“Laurent? Amory?”

Eric wrinkles his nose, “Wait -- does this mean if we ever go on vacation we get to check into a hotel under a false name? Has your dad ever done that? Have _you_ ever done that?”

Jack laughs, “No, I’ve never done that. Mostly because I don’t stay in hotels when I’m on vacation. But when we _do_ go on holiday, I’ll just make you sign in at the hotel. We’ll just go by Mr. and Mr. Bittle.” He slides his palm over the muscled curve of Eric’s thigh and down, encouraging Eric to shift and spread his legs enough to allow Jack access to the soft warm skin of his inner thigh, slip his fingers up to curl under Eric’s balls and run his thumb idly up the underside of Eric’s dick. Eric’s already a little hard from either sleep or Jack or a combination of the two -- Jack can feel his own body waking up in response, as if it’s himself he’s touching not Bits -- and he arches into Jack’s touch with approval, throwing an arm up across the pillow and anchoring himself with a hand wrapped around the bed rail.

“God, _Jack_ ,” he says. And Jack doesn’t stop.

oOo

_“Come to bed, Jack,” Eric says, sleepy yet not sleepy at the other end of the couch._

_After dinner they’d watched_ Jaws _with Coach and Suzanne, and then the Bittles had said their "good nights" and drifted upstairs. While they waited for Eric’s parents to finish with the bathroom for the night, Eric flipped aimlessly through Netflix offerings with his eyes on the television but his attention very clearly on Jack._

_They’d started the movie at opposite ends of the couch, Rich in a Laz-E-Boy armchair and Suzanne rocking gently in wicker rocker, working steadily away on a piece of intricate cross stitch while the movie played. But they had barely made it to Richard Dreyfuss’ first info dump about sharks before Eric had slid down against the arm of the sofa and pushed his bare feet into Jack’s lap._

_Jack had drawn his right hand in a firm sweep up Bitty’s calf from knee to ankle and then begun working the tension out of his arches and balls of his feet, first one foot then the other. As he does this, he realizes all over again how patently obvious he and Eric must have been to everyone around them (except, it seems, themselves) because this is a position they’ve assumed on countless nights since January on the sagging Haus couch while watching whatever movie had been decreed by Ransom and Holster._

_The first time had been, tacitly, because Eric had slipped during practice and turned his ankle. Not hard enough even to bruise but there had been some swelling and Coach Hall and strongly suggested icing and elevation. So Jack had offered his thigh for Eric to rest his ice-wrapped ankle on while they watched_  The Philadelphia Story.

_That had been the first time._

_The second time Jack hadn’t questioned Bitty’s motives when Bitty slid his feet into Jack’s lap fifteen minutes into_ Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion _._

 _And the third time Bitty certainly hadn’t voiced any objections aloud when, halfway through_ Sunshine _, Jack had pulled Bitty’s feet across his lap and started working the knots out of Eric’s calf._

_At the time it had felt nice, undeniably, but also within the realm of normal in the Haus where physical boundaries were casual and relationships confusing enough to Jack that he’d filed it all away as a part of college culture he would never understand but which he let his teammates get away with._

_Bittle was one of his teammates, right?_

_Now, looking back, he sees the flirtation for what it was -- and this moment for what it is: Eric openly flirting with Jack in front of his parents in their own living room. It feels like Eric_ claiming _him and Jack lets himself acknowledge the fact that -- like Eric asserting his right to kiss Jack in the airport -- this does something deep in the part of Jack that’s always felt profoundly alone._

_And when Eric says “Come to bed, Jack,” Jack isn’t under any illusions that they haven’t started down that road since the minute Eric pressed his heel a little more firmly than necessary against Jack’s groin._

oOo

“So what are we doing today?” Jack asks, watching from the bed as Eric towels his hair dry and pulls clean clothes from his dresser. It’s Jack’s turn in the bathroom and he knows he should be taking it, but he likes the intimacy of watching Eric get dressed. Now he’ll be able to spend the day knowing that apart from Bitty, only Jack knows what color briefs are underneath those ass-hugging shorts that Eric is pulling on.

“Pancake breakfast down at the firehouse.” Eric grins. “It’s a family tradition. And then there’s a parade, but we don’t have to stay for that -- and there’ll be fireworks tonight. Oh! And then _tomorrow_ night the Bittle clan all gets together at Aunt Josie’s for a picnic? My parents have offered to cover for us if you don’t want to risk it, but --”

“I’d like to meet your family,” Jack says, firmly, rolling over and sitting up. “Do you … am I going as your boyfriend?”

Eric comes back over to the bed and climbs into Jack’s lap, which is -- _Crisse_ \-- something Jack is pretty sure he will never get enough of. “I’d .. I’d _like_ to take you as my boyfriend,” Eric says, rubbing noses with Jack and then kissing the tip of his nose. “But if you think it’s too risky --” Jack pulls him in so he can bury his nose into the freshly-showered scent of Eric’s throat. His skin is still damp along his collarbone where he’s been sloppy with the towel and Jack licks the moisture from Bitty’s skin, feeling Bitty shiver under his tongue.

This isn’t actually helping them have the discussion they need to have, though, so he pulls back and looks up into Eric’s face, reaching up with a hand to pull Eric’s eyes down to his own.

He takes a deep breath, then shakes his head in frustration at his own internal monologue of anxiety.

“I don’t want this -- it shouldn’t be a conversation about risk,” he says, pressing his forehead into Eric’s shoulder.

“I know, honey,” Eric says, instantly soothing, sliding a hand up over the back of Jack’s neck.

“No I mean --” Jack stops, then starts again. “When I talked to Marci on Tuesday she reminded me that no one’s entitled to this, to you, to what you mean to me. But -- there are people who _do_ feel entitled to me. To their story _about_ me. That’s been true since before I was born and the tabloid photographers were taking photographs of my mother in her maternity clothes and demanding to know the sex of the baby.”

“That’s not --” Eric starts, but Jack presses a finger to his lips to cut off the outrage. He'll let Bitty get outraged at celebrity journalism another day, but right now he doesn't want what he has to say derailed by righteous anger, however hot he might find it.

“My point is,” he says, when Eric subsides, “is that at some point they will tell stories about me, and about us. And there are people who should hear our story _from us_ before then. The rest of the team -- the Samwell team -- we should tell them before school starts. And I’d like to talk to Georgia, and the guys. If you want me to come to the picnic tomorrow as your boyfriend, we’ll take our chances. But I think -- I think that means I talk to Georgia when I get back to Pawtucket. And I tell the team. Not just that I’m gay -- but that I have you. In my life.”

Eric looks down at him with an expression on his face that Jack struggles to parse, and for a moment he thinks Eric is going to say no, he’s not ready. That’s it’s all going to fast. That he’s having second thoughts. That --

“Yeah,” Bitty says softly. “Yeah you're damn right you do.”


	49. Sunday, 5 July 2015

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is dedicated to all of you, my lovely readers. Thank you all for riding along. You are amazingly generous with your time and compliments. You help guide me toward better storytelling and I am forever grateful.
> 
> I've said this in comments, but I already know I'm not done with this 'verse. I know better than to give timetables, but I already have the rough draft of a drabble about Ransom and Holster at Niagara Falls on the 4th that I plan to post to this series later in the week.

Even though Eric had been the one to raise the question of the Bittle family annual 4th of July cookout -- the one to express a preference for taking Jack not just as the family guest, as a friend from college, but as his _boyfriend_  -- it doesn’t actually hit him until they’re halfway to Aunt Josie’s that Jack actually said _yes_. And that they’re going to get out of the van on the other end of this drive as a couple.

It’s climbing toward a real feel of 103℉ outside and still Eric feels a cold sweat break out across his skin.

Jack reaches over from where he’s sitting behind Suzanne and squeezes Eric’s knee. “You okay?”

Suzanne takes her eyes off the road to spare a glance over her shoulder. “You need to drive honey? Or need me to pull over?” As a child Eric had been prone to getting carsick and even now sometimes if he’s not in the front seat he starts feeling queasy. But this time, it’s not his stomach that’s the problem.

“No, Mama, I’m fine. Just nervous.” He puts a hand over Jack’s where it still rests on his knee and interlaces their fingers.

“I talked to Josie this morning,” Coach says. “She and Tim know you and Jack will be there and everyone else'll follow their lead. Doug and Tracy will probably be uncomfortable, but they say anything directly to you and you just tell them to take it up with your mama and me.”

Eric sighs.

“We can always turn around and drive straight home,” Suzanne reminds him. “They’re family but that doesn’t mean they have permission to speak their mind without consequence. I’ve unfriended cousins on Facebook before now and I will do so again if necessary.”

“Thanks,” Eric bites his lip. It’s one thing to be bold in front of strangers or parents who may frustrate him sometimes but who he knows, now, love him and are ready to fold Jack into the family. It’s another thing to take Jack out onto a lawn full of maybe fifty Bittle relatives and feel the eyes of his grandpa and his great-grandma and his aunts and uncles and cousins all _watching_ him.

“Breathe, Bits.” Jack murmurs. “We got your back, eh?”

* * *

When they pull into the drive twenty minutes later, the circular drive is already filled with half a dozen vehicles and the barbeque is in full swing on the long, sloping lawn that leads down to the apple orchard. Someone’s set up the croquet set and a couple of the older cousins are wrangling the littluns in a game while the burgers and bratwursts and ears of corn roast on the long grilles set up on the deck by the pool.

“You boys help me take this food into the kitchen, why don’t you,” Suzanne says, popping the trunk and pushing it all the way up to reveal the hampers and stacked Tupperware of cupcakes in red, white, and blue, blueberry and strawberry-rhubarb pies, the heavy cream for whipping, and the mason jars of chocolate-dipped pretzel sticks with their patriotic sprinkles. Jack and Eric had spent much of the morning helping Suzanne with the production-line baking that will end up providing dessert for the clan.

Arms laden with food, Jack and Eric enter the house through the sliding glass doors that lead directly to the kitchen, and Eric realizes his mother’s genius as soon as he sets foot inside. Because _this_ is familiar ground. Ever since he was as young as the cousins out playing croquet he’s been more comfortable in here with the womenfolk than he has been with the men in the den watching Wimbledon or tending the meat on the grille. Here there’s something to do with his hands, and if he makes himself useful scooping watermelon or whipping cream or mixing the shortcake batter he doesn’t have to talk about what he’s doing these days in school or skirt the awkward silences that surround the parts of his life he doesn’t really want to share.

“Oh, Suzanne! Eric!” Aunt Josie comes bustling over from the sink. “You can just put those -- doesn’t anything need to be refrigerated? There’s space left on the second shelf. And you must be Jack.” She wipes her hands on the towel tucked into her belt loop and sticks out a hand as Jack sets down the hamper and the tray of pies he’s been carrying.

“Thank you for having me,” he says, accepting the hand she proffers in greeting.

“This is your first visit to Georgia, Suzanne tells me?”

“I’ve been to Atlanta before, for --” Jack catches himself, “-- for conferences. But this is my first visit to Madison. It’s beautiful. Those are your apple trees?” He gestures toward the edge of the orchard, where someone has strung a couple of hammocks between the trees. Doug and Tracy’s three kids are taking turns climbing into and dumping themselves out of them.

“They are. Feel free to go for a wander,” Aunt Josie nods. “Eric can show you down to the river.”

“Just let me get this cream whipped for the --” getting to the orchard requires crossing the lawn full of people and Eric would rather stay here in the house for now, where his mother and Aunt Josie are already busy comparing shortbread recipes.

“Go on, son,” Coach says, coming into the kitchen with the last two hampers of food. “You’ve been helping your mother all day. Take Jack down to the river. Tim says the pool’s nice and deep this year, and they put up a new rope for swinging.”

* * *

They skirt the edge of the party hand in hand, managing to wave to a handful of people without actually stopping to chat. Eric breathes a sigh of relief as they make it past the first two rows of trees and the chatter and whack of balls and mallets. If they’re gone for half an hour his parents will field the first round of curious questions before he and Jack have to make polite conversation over burgers and beer.

“I should have brought my camera,” Jack says, ducking under a low-hanging branch. “This is beautiful.”

“When I was a kid, I used to imagine being a farmer when I grew up,” Eric confesses. “Or, actually,” he laughs, “I think I wanted to be a farmer’s _wife._ Every time we came to visit Aunt Josie she was in the kitchen preparing food and I thought what an amazing job that would be -- to grow and cook up delicious food to feed people.”

“You’re good at that,” Jack says. He’s quiet for a few minutes while they follow a row of Jonagolds down the rolling hillside to the riverbank. They stop once or twice so Jack can pull his phone out of his pocket and take a few pictures of the fruit heavy on the branches, the late-afternoon sun slanting through the humid air, Eric as he reaches to swing himself up onto a branch.

“Do you still want to?” Jack asks, his face turned up to look at Eric where he’s balanced on his belly along the twisting branch.

“Want to what?” Eric rests his chin on the back of his hand and reaches down to drag his thumb across Jack’s bottom lip. “Oh, be a farmer’s wife?”

“Mmm.” Jack turns his head to follow the path of Eric’s hand along his jaw, pressing his lips to the pad of Eric’s thumb. As he turns, the stretch of his neck reveals the edge of a bruise Eric left the night before in the meat of Jack’s shoulder. Eric feels his stomach clench at the sight, at the knowledge that he’s left marks on Jack’s body. _Mine_ he thinks. He’s _mine mine mine_.

He gives Jack’s question a moment or two of serious thought while enjoying the advantage of height the tree branch gives him over Jack.

“I don’t think so?” he says, finally. “Running a family farm is being a small business owner except you’re entirely dependent on things outside of your control like the weather. One hail storm and -- _pfft_.” He pulls his hand back from Jack’s cheek and rolls back off the branch, dropping softly to the ground so they can continue their walk.

“What about you? Did you always want to play hockey?” He’s ashamed to realize he’s always assumed this to be the case.

Jack captures Eric’s hand again, interlacing their fingers and pulling Eric into his side as the walk. Eric is growing used to this, to moving through the world attached to this other person who always seems to be less than an arm’s length away. The touching is new, but it feels like the natural extension of the assured proximity he and Jack have had since last August. Eric is starting to feel _entitled_ to having Jack as accessible to him as rolling over in the night. He’s already dreading next Saturday morning when he has to drop Jack at the airport and let him fly back to Pawtucket alone.

Jack, like Eric, considers the question before responding.

“I’ve always loved playing hockey,” he says, finally. “It’s -- there’s nothing else like it. And the one time I stopped playing, for nearly a year after the overdose, I never stopped missing it. Even when I wanted to hate it, I couldn’t.” He sighs. “But I’m also ... “

Eric holds his tongue.

“I don’t know how to say this any way that doesn’t make me sound like an asshole,” Jack admits, as they approach the water. Eric slips out of his sneakers and sits down on the bank so he can let his feet down into the comparatively cool water of the spring. Jack drops to the ground beside him and does the same.

“So just be an asshole about it,” Eric says, bumping Jack’s shoulder with his own. “I promise I’ll laugh at you and then we’ll figure out a better way to say it next time.”

“What I’ve been thinking is,” Jack says, leaning back into Eric’s shoulder so they’re supporting each other as they paddle their feet in an effort to cool down. “I’m good at hockey. _Really_ good at hockey. But just because I’m good at hockey … everyone assumes because I’m good at hockey that’s what I should do with my life. And I don’t want to stop playing. I don’t mean -- but sometimes I wonder if I made the right choice. To make it my job.”

“What would you do if you weren’t a professional hockey player?” Eric asks, after it becomes clear Jack is done with his thought. Eric himself has no idea what he wants to do with his life beyond the relatively-new certainty that he wants to spend it with Jack. Wherever and however that will be possible. So he doesn’t feel like he has much room to judge here.

Jack shrugs against Eric’s arm. “I’ve...never actually thought about that. At least...not for a really long time. I mean. Coaching was the other option, the fallback option. But sometimes I wonder..." he gestures around them, the sweep of his arm taking in the orchard behind them. “I’ve been wondering what it would be like to make a life in one _place_. And do what you could to stay there, you know?”

* * *

As the fireflies are coming out, Eric finds Jack sitting in a quiet corner of the yard with a sleeping infant on his lap, talking to the infant’s parents -- Eric’s cousin Caleb and his fiancée Kallista -- as the three of them bend over Jack’s phone.

“Eric, have you _seen_ these?” Kallista says when she sees him. “You didn’t tell us your boy here was such an amazing a photographer!”

Eric leans over the adirondack chair Jack’s sitting in, sliding his forearms over Jack’s shoulders so he can lay his cheek against Jack’s head and see what they’re looking at. Jack thumbs through a handful of photographs of the orchard, of Eric -- Eric buries his face in Jack’s hair out of embarrassment because every single snapshot positively telegraphs Eric’s joy at being the subject of Jack’s gaze --, of the morning food preparation that morning, the pancake breakfast and parade the day before.

“You say you’re working professionally, now?” Kallista asks, turning to Caleb. “Honey, we should hire him for the wedding!”

“I --” Jack starts, then stops. “When are you getting married?”

“Next summer,” Kallista says. “June 18th.”

“I’d be honored,” Jack says, shifting the listing baby in his lap as he juggles the phone and finally hands it up to Eric so he can resettle himself. “It would be an honor to -- I mean,” he glances up at Eric. “Would it be okay with you if we --?”

“Yeah, of course,” Eric says, feeling a little dazed. It’s been a long evening, not entirely free of furtive discussions and pointed glances. His aunt Tracy and her husband Doug had, as his dad had predicted, kept their distance and left early with the kids -- a departure, Eric feels, that was hastened by the fact that Jack had proven especially popular with the youngest in attendance. His mind flicks back through the sequence of events and realizes that it probably isn’t an accident that just as Tracy and Doug were herding their offspring toward the car, Kallista had planted herself in front of Jack and dumped a giggling Caroline into his accepting hands.

 _Well_ , Eric thinks. His cousin Caleb -- whom until now he’d remembered as a vaguely domineering playmate several years his senior -- has suddenly risen in Eric’s estimation if this is the sort of woman Caleb has chosen to marry.

“Do you have a card? Or - if you have a website we can show your portfolio to the wedding planner!” Kallista is digging in the nearby diaper bag and re-emerges with her phone.

“I, uh -- I didn’t bring any business cards with me,” Jack says, floundering slightly. “And, I --”

“-- we’re in the middle of re-designing his website,” Eric says, feeling Jack’s pulse climbing under his thumb. “How about _we_ email _you_ when it’s back up with all his most recent work? Here,” he straightens and thumbs through the screens of Jack’s phone until he calls up the contacts directory. “Give me your email and phone and I’ll set a reminder in his phone. When’s your next meeting with the wedding planner? I’ve been tinkering with some of the stylesheets but if we have a deadline...”

* * *

It’s nearing midnight when Suzanne turns the van back into their drive and presses the garage door opener so she can pull straight into the garage before killing the engine. They all pile wearily out of the van and troop into the house.

“You boys go on up,” Suzanne says. “I need to go out and water the garden before going to bed.”

“And I’m gonna watch the weather,” Coach says. “Sounds like we might get some turbulent storms day after tomorrow -- we’ll need to decide whether or not the tomatoes need covering.”

Eric and Jack drag themselves upstairs without talking and go through the motions of brushing their teeth and washing up before falling into bed. Jack strips off and steps into the shower while Eric is standing there rinsing with mouthwash. Without even asking in so many words, Eric spits, strips, and steps in after him. He’s so tired it doesn’t feel sexual so much as necessary: he just wants to be where Jack is, and Jack’s in the shower. So that’s where Eric goes.

Jack’s standing in the dim -- neither one of them bothered to turn on the overhead light -- with the cool water running down over his dark hair and bare shoulders. He’s been wearing his glasses all evening -- his Clark Kent disguise, he’d said with a smirk -- and now he looks strangely vulnerable without them. Eric reaches up to wipe the water droplets from Jack’s eyelashes, then wraps himself around Jack's front and lets the water wash over them both.

It’s both sexual and not, pressing his ear to Jack’s chest and listening to Jack’s heartbeat underneath the white noise of the shower. He slides his palms down the small of Jack’s back and over the swell of his ass, feeling the way the cool water is warming as it passes across over-warm skin. He can feel Jack’s dick soft against his belly and the part of his body that isn’t beyond exhausted clenches with the memory of what Eric’s now allowed to do with that intimate part of Jack -- the sounds Jack makes when Eric touches him, mouths at him, settles his weight _just so_.

On the other side of the bathroom door, he hears his mom or dad climb up the stair and make their way along the hall to the master bedroom. Eric sighs and steps back from Jack, who catches his elbow with a wet hand as if loathe to let him go.

“We should -- my parents will need the bathroom,” Eric says, apologetically. “We should finish up in here.”

So they get out and dry off and duck across the hall to the privacy of Eric’s bedroom wrapped in damp towels.

Jack moves to dig out a fresh pair of boxers from his suitcase but Eric says, “Sweetheart, could we --? I just want you naked.” So they sink down onto Eric’s mattress and Eric wraps himself back around Jack, slinging a leg over his thighs and draping an arm across Jack's chest so that the tips of his fingers just graze the purpling hickey he left at the base of Jack’s throat.

Jack turns his head to nuzzle at Eric’s temple, pressing a sleepy kiss, then another, against Eric’s heavy eyelids.

“ _Mmm_.” Eric manages, pursing his lips in the ghost of a return kiss.

“Rechargeable batteries,” he murmurs half to himself.

“Hmm?” Jack’s nearly asleep himself, hand slipping off the back of Eric’s shoulder where he’s folded Eric close.

“Touching you,” Eric elaborate, patting Jack’s chest with a sleep-heavy hand. “ ‘s like recharging batteries. ‘f I did this every night, probably wouldn’t need coffee ever again.”

“Every night is good,” Jack murmurs. “Promise?”

“Promise,” Eric says, and drifts off to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apples [are a crop in Georgia](http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/business-economy/apples), particularly northern Georgia, so imagine that Aunt Josie lives somewhere an hour or so north of Madison.
> 
> Some of you seem to be coming to this work from elsewhere without being aware it is [part of an ongoing series](http://archiveofourown.org/series/465904). If you haven't already read it, you may enjoy [this brief glimpse of Jack and Eric's life in Pawtucket](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6650110) roughly a year later. I also write regular [Twitfic](http://archiveofourown.org/series/464530) set more or less in this 'verse. 
> 
> Read what you like, and leave the rest for me ;-)


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